Zehnder interferometry, Mach

Inoue, K., Komatsu, S., Trinh, X. A., Norisuye, T. and Tran-Cong-Miyata, Q. (2005) Local deformation in photo-crosslinked polymer blends monitored by Mach-Zehnder interferometry. J. Polym. Sci. Part B Polym. Phys., 43, 2898-2913. 

Fig. 6.16 Schematic of optical arrangments for Shadowgraphy and Mach-Zehnder interferometry [21].

By using Mach-Zehnder interferometry, the development and relaxation of this reaction-induced strain field were detected and analyzed during and after the irradiation process. From these experimental results, we were able to correlate the resulting morphologies with the reaction-induced strain. 

In this paper, we propose an experiment to test neutrality of isolated lithium atoms. Atom interferometry has been shown to be the ideal technique to measure weak interactions of an atom with its environment [1,2]. In particular, in 1991, Kasevich and Chu have mentionned the test of neutrality of atoms as a possible utilisation of their atomic interferometer [2], As far as we know, no further details have been published. The experimental set-up we propose is based on a Mach-Zehnder atom interferometer like the ones developped by the research groups of D. Pritchard [3], Siu Au Lee [4], A. Zeilinger [5] and the one under construction in our group [6]. If the same uniform electric field E is applied on both arms of the interferometer, a phase shift of the interferometric signal will appear. This phase shift will be proportional to the residual charge of lithium atom and to the electric field E. 

Fig. 4 Mach-Zehnder interferometer for classical interferometry. Here, one arm, the grey one, is functionalized with AuNPs to allow for a thiol surface functionalization for an immunoreaction, instead of a silanization procedure...

Interferometry is a long established and widely recognized optical detection technique. Its various configurations (Fizeau, Michelson, Fabry-Perot, Ramsey-Borde, Mach-Zehnder and back-scattering interferometry) have been adapted to perform optical detection on Bio-CD platforms [8] (Fig. 4). 

Many types of interferometry can be used for this purpose. For instance, the Twyman-Green interferometer [11] is suitable for surface testing in reflection. The Mach-Zehnder interferometer permits lens testing in transmission [12]. The third interferometric technique utilizes a Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor [10,13,14]. This method can be applied to both reflection and transmission. Interestingly, the Shack-Hartmaim sensor utilizes a microlens array in front of a CCD imager array to create a series of focal spots that are recorded by the CCD imager to obtain the wavefront. 

We know of many types of optical interferometer (the simple double-slit Young interferometer, the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the Fabry-Perot interferometer, the Talbot interferometer, etc.). A similar situation occurs in atom interferometry. Artificial laboratory devices exploit various types of structure for atom interferometry both material bodies (slits and gratings) and nonmaterial light structures. All these atom interferometers will be considered very briefly we refer readers for details to the book by Berman (1997) and reviews by Baudon et al. (1999), Kasevich (2002), and Chu (2002). 

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