Inertial quantum sensors using light and matter

Abstract

Abstract. The past few decades have seen dramatic progress in our ability to manipulate and coherently control matter-waves. Although the duality between particles and waves has been well tested since de Broglie introduced the matter-wave analog of the optical wavelength in 1924, manipulating atoms with a level of coherence that enables one to use these properties for precision measurements has only become possible with our ability to produce atomic samples exhibiting temperatures of only a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Since the initial experiments a few decades ago, the field of atom optics has developed in many ways, with both fundamental and applied significance. The exquisite control of matter waves offers the prospect of a new generation of force sensors exhibiting unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy, for applications from navigation and geophysics to tests of general relativity. Thanks to the latest developments in this field, the first commercial products using this quantum technology are now available. In the future, our ability to create large coherent ensembles of atoms will allow us an even more precise control of the matter-wave and the ability to create highly entangled states for non-classical atom interferometry.

Spatially homogeneous entanglement for matter-wave interferometry created with time-averaged measurements

“…The 11(1) dB of squeezing observed in this work would in principle fully translate to this type of interferometer. In addition to the possibility of using entangled states, performing the final readout via a cavity measurement may allow for reduced technical noise, higher bandwidth, cleaner optical modes, and power buildup for Raman transitions [25].Similarly, higher order transverse modes, atom-chip technologies [26,27], or tailored potentials [28,29] might be combined with the cavity measurement technique presented here to create new varieties of matter-wave Sagnac interferometers and other inertial sensors. The real-time observation of mechanical motion also opens the path to stochastic cooling schemes based on measurement and feedback [30] with applications to more complex systems such as molecules, which can be challenging to laser cool using conventional Doppler cooling methods.…”

“…In this work we focus on preparing spin-squeezed states appropriate for matter-wave atom interferometry with applications including inertial sensing [9], measurements of gravity and freefall, [10,11] and even the search for certain proposed types of dark matter and dark energy [12,13].…”

Navigation-Compatible Hybrid Quantum Accelerometer Using a Kalman Filter

“…These systems are limited by slow drifts of the biases inherent to their inertial sensors, which ultimately lead to large speed and position errors after integration. Currently, the long-term bias stability of navigation-grade accelerometers is on the order of 10 µg-which, in the absence of aiding sensors such as satellite navigation systems, leads to horizontal position oscillations of 60 m at the characteristic Schuler period of 84.4 minutes [1,2].Since their first demonstration in the early 1990s, atom interferometers (AIs) have proven to be excellent absolute inertial sensors-having been exploited as ultra-high sensitivity instruments for fundamental tests of physics [3][4][5][6][7][8], and as state-of-the-art gravimeters with accuracies in the range of 1 − 10 ng achieved both in laboratories [9][10][11][12][13][14] and with compact transportable systems [15][16][17][18][19]. As a result, they have been proposed for the next generation of inertial navigation systems [20][21][22][23].…”

Limitations for field-enhanced atom interferometry

“…Different forces acting on the two arms of the interferometers requires at least two different internal states |1 and |2 on which the external field produce different accelerations a 1 and a 2 . The force acting differentially on both states will create two well spatially separated arms [31,56] with spatial and internal states entangled. This has to be compare to Talbot-Lau setup or classical moiré deflectometer, where this entanglement does not exist, and so where the final measurement has to be spatially resolved.…”