Image enhancement for a Bose-Einstein condensate interferometer

The atom, thanks to its wave behaviour, can manifest phenomena which are, usually, associated to light: interference is one of them. The possibility of cooling atomic clouds and manipulating the states of the atoms contained in them opened many new opportunities to exploit these states in many ways; one of them is measuring various kinds of physical observables with high precision, thanks to the aforementioned interference phenomena: this is atom interferometry. Since the first Bose-Einstein condensates in atomic gases were obtained, there has been a keen interest in interference between them, as it would mean to observe coherent quantum phenomena between macroscopic objects. Nevertheless, the high atomic density of condensates with respect to non condensed, thermal atomic clouds makes it difficult to ignore the effects of interactions within them. For the applications, understanding the role of interactions in the formation of interference figures is crucial. In this thesis, an algorithm for the enhancement of absorption images of a condensate has been developed. This algorithm computes an image basis for the noise and then remove the projection of the starting image from this basis, thus obtaining a clean image. This algorithm has then been applied to the enhancement of images obtained from atom interferometry. These images have then been analyzed using two techniques, and the obtained results have been compared to those for an ideal condensate. The results have been found not compatible with the ideal case, and are then due to atom-atom interactions.