We report on a new method to calibrate the depth of an optical lattice. It
consists in triggering the intrasite dipole mode of the cloud by a sudden phase
shift. The corresponding oscillatory motion is directly related to the
intraband frequencies on a large range of lattice depths. Remarkably, for a
moderate displacement, a single frequency dominates this oscillation for the
zeroth and first order interference pattern observed after a sufficiently long
time-of-flight. The method is robust against atom-atom interactions and the
exact value of the extra external confinement of the initial trapping
potential.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
