Measurement of gravitational acceleration by dropping atoms

Laser collimation of a continuous beam of cold atoms using Zeeman-shift degenerate-Raman-sideband cooling

“…The magnetic field necessary to shift adjacent Zeeman sublevels by an amount equal to the vibrational energy splitting is B max Ϸ 140 mG in the center and B min Ϸ 11 mG at the edge of the laser beam. 3 The experimental optimum lies between these upper and lower bounds.…”

“…6. 3 The Zeeman frequency shift of adjacent magnetic sublevels is 350 kHz/ G for the hyperfine ground states of cesium.…”

“…Since the discovery of laser cooling [1], beams of slow and cold atoms have played an ever more important role in high-precision experiments-e.g., in atomic interferometry experiments [2,3] and atomic fountain clocks [4]. In this context the continuous beam approach [5] is interesting because it dramatically reduces all undesirable effects of atomic density [4] and the Dick effect which is unavoidable in pulsed beams [6,7].…”

Atom interferometers and optical atomic clocks: New quantum sensors for fundamental physics experiments in space

“…In particular, atom interferometers are new tools for experimental gravitation as, for example, for precision measurement of gravity acceleration [15], gravity gradients [16], Newtonian gravitational constant G [17], gravity at micrometric distances [18,19], and for testing equivalence principle [20]. The possibility of detecting gravitational waves by atom interferometry was also discussed [21,22].…”

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.…”