Diffraction phases in atom interferometers
Résumé
Diffraction of atoms by laser is a very important tool for matterwave optics. Although this process is well understood, the phaseshifts induced by this diffraction process are not well known. Inthis paper, we make analytic calculations of these phase shifts insimple cases and we use these results to model the contrastinterferometer recently built by the group of D. Pritchard at MITto measure the ratio $h/M$ : we thus show that the diffractionphases are important and that they may contribute to the largesystematic error observed in this measurement.