Compact chip-scale guided cold atom gyrometers for inertial navigation: Enabling technologies and design study

Abstract

This work reviews the topic of rotation sensing with compact cold atom interferometers. A representative set of compact free-falling cold atom gyroscopes is considered because, in different respects, they establish a rotation-measurement reference for cold guided-atom technologies. The review first discusses enabling technologies relevant to a set of key functional building blocks of an atom chip-based compact inertial sensor with cold guided atoms. These functionalities concern the accurate and reproducible positioning of atoms to initiate a measurement cycle, the coherent momentum transfer to the atom wave packets, the suppression of propagation-induced decoherence due to potential roughness, the on-chip detection, and the vacuum dynamics because of its impact on the sensor stability, which is due to measurement dead time. Based on the existing enabling technologies, the design of an atom chip gyroscope with guided atoms is formalized using a design case that treats design elements such as guiding, fabrication, scale factor, rotation-rate sensitivity, spectral response, important noise sources, and sensor stability. arXiv:1912.06851v1 [quant-ph]

Membrane MOT: Trapping Dense Cold Atoms in a Sub-Millimeter Diameter Hole of a Microfabricated Membrane Device

“…The past two decades have witnessed remarkable advances in computing and sensing demonstrations that leverage coherence and entanglement in systems well-described by quantum mechanics 1,2 . Concurrently, the advent of microfabrication techniques promises to buttress the exploration of new frontiers in quantum applications [3][4][5] through atom-light interactions [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] in addition to incorporating compact MOTs [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] on atom chips [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] and superconducting circuits [34][35][36][37][38] .…”

Enhanced observation time of magneto-optical traps using micro-machined non-evaporable getter pumps

“…In recent years, significant efforts have been made to address the scalability of cold-atom instruments 18 , 19 , even resulting in the commercialization of compact cold-atom clocks and sensors. Designs for chip-scale cold-atom systems have also been proposed 20 and demonstrated, including novel ways of redirecting laser beams to trap atoms such as the pyramid MOT 21 , 22 and grating-MOT (GMOT) 23 – 25 , as well as density regulators 26 , 27 and low-power coils 28 .…”

Robust inertial sensing with point-source atom interferometry for interferograms spanning a partial period

“…Rotation sensing with optical and matter wave interferometers has a long tradition [1][2][3]. Analogous to the Sagnac phase shift in a laser gyroscope, in a rotating frame, an atom interferometer experiences a Sagnac phase shift proportional to the inner product of the rotation vector and the Sagnac area [4].…”