Manipulating a Bose-Einstein condensate with a single photon

We propose a method to create macroscopic superpositions, so-called Schr?dinger cat states, of different motional states of an ideal Bose-Einstein condensate. The scheme is based on the scattering of a freely expanding condensate by the light field of a high-finesse optical cavity in a quantum superposition state of different photon numbers. The atom-photon interaction creates an entangled state of the motional state of the condensate and the photon number, which can be converted into a pure atomic Schr?dinger cat state by operations only acting on the cavity field. We discuss in detail the fully quantised theory and propose an experimental procedure to implement the scheme using short coherent light pulses. Received 26 June 2000 and Received in final form 2nd October 2000