Measuring the local gravitational field using survival resonances in a dissipatively driven atom-optics system

Abstract

We do a proof-of-principle demonstration of an atomic gravimeter based on survival resonances of dissipatively driven atoms. Exposing laser-cooled atoms to a sequence of near-resonant standing-wave light pulses reveals survival resonances when the standing-wave interference pattern accelerates. The resonant accelerations determine the local gravitational acceleration and we achieve a precision of 5 ppm with a drop distance less than 1 mm. The incisiveness of the resonances scales with the square of the drop time. Present results indicate that an appropriately designed atomic gravimeter based on survival resonances might be able to reach a precision of 1 μGal with a 10-cm-high fountain. The relatively simple experimental construction of this technique may be of interest for a compact absolute atomic gravimeter.

Enhancing survival resonances with engineered dissipation

“…Recall that Refs. [16,17] outline how to calculate the survival probabilities in the absence of recycling s N needed for evaluation of Eq. (3).…”

“…We have experimentally studied how to use this process as a preparation stage, which leads to a substantial enhancement of survival resonance peaks in the δ-killed rotor. This can improve the sensitivity of measurements based on survival resonances [17].…”

“…1(b), survive N consecutive standingwave pulses s N . References [16,17] provide the method for calculating s N . The probability that atoms, in the reservoir state right after a standing-wave pulse, are recycled before the next is γ , where γ is a function of the recycle light pulse duration τ R .…”

“…The superposition states are ideally suited for precision measurements, and we observe that they improve the signal-to-noise ratio of an atomic interferometer by a factor of more than 2. The designed dissipation arises from combining survival resonances in the atom-optics δ-killed rotor [16,17] with recycling of lost atoms through laser-cooling [18,19].…”

Quantum to Classical Walk Transitions Tuned by Spontaneous Emissions

“…We also confirm the SE events lead to a biased momentum distribution, which agrees well with our numerical simulations. Our findings demonstrate a scheme to control the robustness of quantum walks and can also be applied to other cold atom experiments involving spontaneous emissions [18,19].…”