Bright Matter-Wave Solitons, Interferometry, and Rotational Sensing Seminar

An ultracold ensemble of bosonic atoms can condense into a Bose-Einstein condensate, where it is frequently legitimate to use a classical field description, encapsulated in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In certain limiting geometries this tends to the one-dimensional nonlinear Schroedinger equation, which in the case of attractive atom-atom interactions, supports bright soliton solutions. These attractively particle-like wave-forms have a number of advantages when considering the possibility of matter-wave interferometry --- using atoms or molecules rather than light to make interference measurements. I will talk about some of the issues surrounding such interferometric protocols, discussing Sagnac interferometry (for rotational sensing) as a particular example.