High-fidelity splitting of Bose-Einstein condensates into high-order momentum states

Matter-wave interferometers that are based on Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) have important precision-measurement applications in both fundamental sciences and in improvement of devices like accelerometers and rotation sensors. A crucial part of realizing a BEC-based interferometer is the matter-wave beam splitter. Optimal splitting of a stationary BEC into a linear superposition of states with high momentum enables the split matter-waves to travel further and thus, increases the sensitivity of matter-wave interferometers. Recent work (Cassidy et al., J. Appl. Phys., 130, 194402 (2021)) has numerically explored different shapes of optical splitting pulses for achieving high-momentum states with robust fidelity. In this work, we experimentally investigate splitting Bose-Einstein condensates into high-order target momentum states using optical standing-wave Bragg pulse sequences of various shapes. We also numerically explore the high-order momentum splitting dynamics with different pulse shapes using one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii (GPE) simulations. We will report the comparison between our splitting experiments and the GPE simulations.