Two-center interferometry and decoherence effects
James M. Feagin · Physical Review A · 2006
We analyze reduced fringe visibilities and decoherence effects in two-center interference experiments involving photon scattering and trapped-ion and atom interferometry. We introduce an impulse approximation to analyze the resulting photon-atom momentum entanglement. We find that the simple decoherence due to photon scattering of double-humped center-of-mass states of a single trapped ion strongly resembles that observed in atom interferometry.