Exploring wave–particle behaviors of entangled Bragg diffracted neutral atoms

Abstract

In this paper, we theoretically study the concept of the wave–particle duality of two entangled neutral Bragg diffracted atoms. This is an extension of a recent study where the same idea was proposed in the photonic setup [Man et al., Sci. Rep. 7, 42539 (2017)] using two independent Mach–Zehnder interferometers. Now, we propose a similar scheme using the cavity-QED based setup, which comprises two independent atomic de Broglie Mach–Zehnder–Bragg interferometers, a source cavity that generates two external momenta state entangled atoms. Once the atoms pass through the source cavity initially prepared in the superposition of zero and one photon, they emerge out of the cavity in entangled momenta state such that if one atom is transmitted to the upper interferometer, then the second atom must traverse the lower interferometer, and vice versa. The final atomic de Broglie beam splitter at the top interferometer is prepared in the superposition of zero and one photon and facilitates observing the wave or particle aspect in a single setting. This entire setup functions in off-resonant Bragg diffraction and the proposed schematics are shown to be experimentally feasible under contemporary research scenarios.