Nowadays, light-pulse interferometry with cold atoms has become a powerful tool to test the fundamental laws of physics. I will present briefly the basic concepts of this technique and review the many applications from table-top to large-scale experiments. I will focus on the determination of the fine structure constant from the measurement of the recoil velocity of an atom after the absorption of a photon. I will present the most recent result of the new experiment in Paris and conclude my talk with a discussion of the comparison between the experimental value of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron and the one predicted by the standard model using this value of the fine structure constant.