  The use of off-resonant standing light waves to manipulate ultracold atoms is
investigated. Previous work has illustrated that optical pulses can provide
efficient beam-splitting and reflection operations for atomic wave packets. The
performance of these operations is characterized experimentally using
Bose-Einstein condensates confined in a weak magnetic trap. Under optimum
conditions, fidelities of up to 0.99 for beam splitting and 0.98 for reflection
are observed, and splitting operations of up to third order are achieved. The
dependence of the operations on light intensity and atomic velocity is measured
and found to agree well with theoretical estimates.
