Demonstration of a cold atom beam splitter on atom chip

We report an experimental demonstration of a new scheme to split cold atoms on an atom chip. The atom chip consists of a U-wire and a Z-wire. The cold atom cloud is initially loaded and prepared in the Z-trap, which is split into two separate parts by switching on the current of the U-wire. The two separate atom clouds have a distance more than one millimeter apart from each other and show almost symmetrical profiles, corresponding to about a 50/50 splitting ratio. (paper)