Atom interferometry measurement of the electric polarizability of lithium

Abstract

Using an atom interferometer, we have measured the static electric polarizability of 7 Li α = (24.33 ± 0.16) × 10 −30 m 3 = 164.19 ± 1.08 atomic units with a 0.66% uncertainty. Our experiment, which is similar to an experiment done on sodium in 1995 by D. Pritchard and co-workers, consists in applying an electric field on one of the two interfering beams and measuring the resulting phaseshift. With respect to D. Pritchard's experiment, we have made several improvements which are described in detail in this paper: the capacitor design is such that the electric field can be calculated analytically; the phase sensitivity of our interferometer is substantially better, near 16 mrad/ √ Hz; finally our interferometer is species selective so that impurities present in our atomic beam (other alkali atoms or lithium dimers) do not perturb our measurement. The extreme sensitivity of atom interferometry is well illustrated by our experiment: our measurement amounts to measuring a slight increase ∆v of the atom velocity v when it enters the electric field region and our present sensitivity is sufficient to detect a variation ∆v/v ≈ 6 × 10 −13 .

Emending thermal dispersion interactions of Li, Na, K, and Rb alkali-metal atoms with graphene in the Dirac model

“…In Table 1, we present the static polarizabilities that are reported by us [12] and compare them with the results that are used in the earlier works from SOM [33] and the experimental results [50][51][52]. The calculation details of our polarizability results are explained in [12] and in the references therein.…”

Influence of lasers propagation delay on the sensitivity of atom interferometers

“…Among the various types of coherent beam splitters developed for matter wave manipulation [7,8,9,10,11], two photon transitions have proven to be powerful tools for precise measurements. For instance, atom interferometers based on Bragg transitions [8] can be used for polarisability [12] and fundamental measurements [13]. Stimulated Raman transitions [14] allowed the development of high precision inertial sensors [15,16,17,18], whose performances compete with state of the art instruments [19,20].…”

Theoretical investigation of boundary contours of ground-state atoms in uniform electric fields

“…However, there are only 11 data whose measurement errors are less than 2.1% among the 17 experimental data. The 9 of the 11 accurate experimental data are in groups VIII and I, they are He [25], Ne [26], Ar [27], Kr [28], Xe [29] and Li [30], Na [31], K [32], Rb [32] atoms, and another two atoms are N [33] and Zn [34], respectively. Here, the experimental atomic polarisabilities of groups VIII and I are correlated with | R| R•F , respectively.…”

“…Some commonly accepted theoretical or experimental values of atomic polarisabilities are cited in Figure 6. Among them, the data of He [25], Ne [26], Ar [27], Kr [28], Xe [29], Li [30], Na [31], K [32], Rb [32], N [33], Zn [34], Al [41], Ca [42], Sr [43], In [44], Sn [45] and Cd [46] atoms come from experiments. The remaining data come from quantum mechanical calculations.…”