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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Implementation of a Reference Interferometer for Nanodetection
Published on: April 26, 2014
Observation of saturation of fidelity decay with an atom interferometer
Saijun Wu1, Alexey Tonyushkin, Mara G Prentiss
1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. swu@umd.edu
Abstract:
We use an atom interferometer to investigate the dynamics of matter waves in a periodically pulsed optical standing wave: an atom optics realization of the quantum kicked rotor that exhibits chaotic classical dynamics. We experimentally show that a measure of the coherence between the interferometer diffraction orders can revive after a quick initial loss, and can approach a finite asymptote as the number of kicks increases. This observation demonstrates that quantum fidelity of a classically chaotic system can survive strong perturbations over long times without decay.
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