Atomic interferometer measurements of Berry's and Aharonov-Anandan's phases for isolated spins S > 1/2 non-linearly coupled to external fields
Résumé
The aim of the present paper is to propose experiments for an observation of the significant features of Berry's phases for S>1, studied in our previous theoretical work. They are generated by Hamiltonians endowed with a magnetic dipole together with an electric quadrupole coupling with external B and E fields, assumed orthogonal, this mild restriction leading to geometric and algebraic simplifications. Alkali atoms appear as good candidates for interferometric measurements but there are challenges to be overcome. The only practical way to generate a suitable E-field is to use the ac Stark effect which induces an instability of the dressed atom. Besides atom losses, this might invalidate Berry's phase derivation but this latter problem can be solved by an appropriate detuning. The former puts an upper limit to the cycle duration, which is bounded below by the adiabatic condition. By relying upon our previous analysis of the non-adiabatic corrections, we have been able to reach a compromise for the $^{87}$Rb hf level F=2, m=0 state, which is our candidate for an interferometric measurement of the exotic Berry's phase generated by a rotation of the E-field around the fixed B-field. By a numerical simulation we have shown that the non-adiabatic corrections can be kept below the 0.1% level. As an alternative candidate, we discuss the chromium ground state J=S=3, where the instability problem is easily solved. We make a proposal to extend the measurement of Aharonov-Anandan's phase beyond S=1/2 to the $^{87}$Rb hf level F=m=1, by constructing, with the help of light-shifts, a Hamiltonian able to perform a parallel transport along a closed circuit upon the density matrix space, without any adiabatic constraint. In Appendix A, Berry's phase difference for S=3/2 and 1/2, m=1/2 states is used to perform an entanglement of 3 Qbits.