Maxwell Matter Waves: Coherence Properties, Generation, and Applications

Infleqtion and the JILA Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder

This talk introduces a class of matter waves that are temporally coherent, and that are particularly useful for applications such as inertial and other kinds of sensing.  The coherence of these waves is of the same type that characterizes electromagnetic fields, such as those associated with a laser or a radio wave emitter. Maxwell’s equations tell us that an oscillating electric current gives rise to an oscillating electromagnetic field. Certain ultracold atoms, such as ⁸⁷Rb, interact through s-wave scattering and repel each other in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the repulsion of identical charges.  Through the application of gauge field theory we show that an oscillating current of such ultracold atoms gives rise to a matter wave field that is a faithful analog to the electromagnetic field.  This leads naturally to the notion of Maxwell matter waves. The talk begins with a description of Infleqtion’s cloud-accessible ultracold matter machine that can be used to produce and study oscillating currents and corresponding matter waves.  We motivate the theoretical development with an example inertial sensing application. We close by describing some properties of the Maxwell matterwaves that distinguish them from more familiar de Broglie waves.

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