Detecting inertial effects with airborne matter-wave interferometry

Abstract

Inertial sensors relying on atom interferometry offer a breakthrough advance in a variety of applications, such as inertial navigation, gravimetry or ground- and space-based tests of fundamental physics. These instruments require a quiet environment to reach their performance and using them outside the laboratory remains a challenge. Here we report the first operation of an airborne matter-wave accelerometer set up aboard a 0g plane and operating during the standard gravity (1g) and microgravity (0g) phases of the flight. At 1g, the sensor can detect inertial effects more than 300 times weaker than the typical acceleration fluctuations of the aircraft. We describe the improvement of the interferometer sensitivity in 0g, which reaches 2 x 10-4 ms-2 / √Hz with our current setup. We finally discuss the extension of our method to airborne and spaceborne tests of the Universality of free fall with matter waves.

Characterization of a simultaneous dual-species atom interferometer for a quantum test of the weak equivalence principle

“…These parameters can be easily deduced by fitting the sinusoidal fringes, scanned either by the Raman frequency ramp α in a low vibration environment or by the vibrations themselves, where in that case, the atom sensor is correlated with a mechanical accelerometer. The probability density function [33] of the atom interferometer measurements can also give access to this parameters. A last method can be to simply derive the fringe amplitudes and offsets from the mean value and the standard deviation of the probability density function without any fitting method.…”

“…In order to * alexis.bonnin@onera.fr improve the sensitivity of atom accelerometers, several projects under development aim to compare the free fall of two different atomic species during few seconds, as the sensitivity scales quadratically with the interrogation time, in 10-m-tall atomic fountains [29][30][31], drop towers [32], sounding rockets, parabolic flights [33] and in space [34][35][36]. These projects are developed in parallel with works on the increase of the momentum transfer [37][38][39][40] to enhance the enclosed area and further improve the interferometers sensitivities.…”

Two-dimensional grating magneto-optical trap

“…These successes have spurred interest in transitioning cold atom devices from the lab to more demanding environments [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Recently, a three dimensional grating magneto-optical trap (3D GMOT) was demonstrated that satisfies many needs of a deployable system [18][19][20].…”

High resolution atom interferometry with optical resonators

“…During the past decades, atom interferometry experiments were developed for various applications like precision measurement of fundamental constants [1,2], gravimetry [3], gradiometry [4] or inertial sensing [5,6]. Based on this methods, cold atoms sensors measure interferometrically the inertial effects affecting the experiment with respect to free falling laser-cooled atoms that are split and recombined using two counter-propagating laser beams.…”