Diffraction of a Superfluid Fermi Gas by an Atomic Grating

An atomic grating generated by a pulsed standing-wave laser field is proposed to manipulate the superfluid state in a quantum degenerate gas of fermionic atoms. We show that in the presence of atomic Cooper pairs, the density oscillations of the gas caused by the atomic grating exhibit a much longer coherence time than that in the normal Fermi gas. Our result indicates that the technique of a pulsed atomic grating is a potential candidate to detect the atomic superfluid state in a quantum degenerate Fermi gas.