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arXiv:1907.05466 · Physical Review Letters

Quantum Rotation Sensing with Dual Sagnac Interferometers in an Atom-Optical Waveguide

Edward Moan, R. A. Horne, Tanwa Arpornthip, Zhe Luo, Adam Fallon, Seth Berl, Charles A. Sackett

Published Mar 27, 2020• 94 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We describe a Sagnac interferometer suitable for rotation sensing, implemented using an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic magnetic trap. The atom wave packets are split and recombined by standing-wave Bragg lasers, and the trapping potential steers the packets along circular trajectories with a radius of 0.2 mm. Two conjugate interferometers are implemented simultaneously to provide common-mode rejection of noise and to isolate the rotation signal. With interference visibilities of about 50%, we achieve a rotation sensitivity comparable to Earth's rate in about 10 min of operation. Gyroscope operation was demonstrated by rotating the optical table on which the experiment was performed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.124.120403

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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE•Apr 29, 2016•1 citation
We describe a Sagnac interferometer suitable for rotation sensing, implemented using an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a harmonic magnetic trap. The atom wave packets are split and recombined by standing-wave Bragg lasers, and the trapping potential steers the packets along circular trajectories with a radius of 0.2 mm. Two conjugate interferometers are implemented simultaneously to provide common-mode rejection of noise and to isolate the rotation signal. With interference visibilities of about 50%, we achieve a rotation sensitivity comparable to Earth's rate in about 10 min of operation. Gyroscope operation was demonstrated by rotating the optical table on which the experiment was performed.
We demonstrate a two-dimensional atom interferometer in a harmonic magnetic waveguide using a Bose-Einstein condensate. Such an interferometer could measure rotation using the Sagnac effect. Compared to free space interferometers, larger interactions times and enclosed areas can in principle be achieved, since the atoms are not in free fall. In this implementation, we induce the atoms to oscillate along one direction by displacing the trap center. We then split and recombine the atoms along an orthogonal direction using an off-resonant optical standing wave. We enclose a maximum effective area of 0.1 mm20.1\text{ }{\text{mm}}^{2}0.1 mm2 limited by fluctuations in the initial velocity and by the coherence time of the interferometer. We argue that this arrangement is scalable to enclose larger areas by increasing the coherence time and then making repeated loops.
The Sagnac interferometer for angular-velocity metrology is a hot field in precision measurement. How to increase the area of its interference loop is one of its important concerns. In this paper, we design an ultracold-atom gyroscope by using a far-off-resonance, steerable Bessel optical dipole trap. The standing-wave Bragg beams split, reflect, and recombine the Bose–Einstein condensate packets. Concurrently, the Bessel guide drives a helical, quasi-free trajectory. The key advance of our proposal is that optical guiding enables stable multi-orbit operation in a programmable helical waveguide, providing a scalable route to enhance the effective Sagnac area within a compact footprint. As a representative operating point, we show that N =8 turns with R =0.6 mm yield an effective enclosed area A eff ≈72.4 mm 2 and a correspondingly large Sagnac sensitivity. It is a strong candidate for next-generation atom gyroscopes in rotation sensing.
We propose to develop a new generation of compact high sensitivity gyroscopes using guided matter-waves on atom chips, able to fulfill the requirements of metrological applications. They will be designed to overcome the main limitations of free falling atoms interferometers: interrogation time and quantum projection noise. A cloud of cold 87Rb atoms will be coherently split and constrained to propagate along a circular guide of a few millimeters radius. At the output of the guide an interference signal sensitive to rotation via the Sagnac effect will be measured.
Matter-wave interferometry with atoms propagating in a guiding potential is expected to provide compact, scalable and precise inertial sensing. However, a rotation sensing device based on the Sagnac effect with atoms guided in a ring has not yet been implemented despite continuous efforts during the last two decades. Here we discuss some intrinsic effects that limit the coherence in such a device and propose a scheme that overcomes these limitations and enables a multi-pass guiding Sagnac interferometer with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) on a chip in a ring potential. We analyze crucial dephasing effects: potential roughness, phase diffusion due to atom-atom interactions and number uncertainty, and phase fluctuations. Owing to the recent progress in achieving high momentum beam splitting, creating smooth guides, and manipulating the matter-wavepacket propagation, guided interferometry can be implemented within the coherence time allowed by phase diffusion. Despite the lower particle flux in a guided Sagnac ring and the miniaturization of the interferometer, the estimated sensitivity, for reasonable and practical realizations of an atom chip-based gyroscope, is comparable to that of free-space interferometers, reaching 45 nrads^{-1}Hz^{-1/2}. A significant improvement over state-of-the-art free-space gyrocope sensitivities can be envisioned by using thermal atoms instead of a BEC, whereby the interferometer can be operated in a continuous fashion with the coherence limited by the scattering rate of the atoms with the background gas. Taking into account the sensitivity times length of the interferometer as the figure of merit which takes into account compactness, our configuration is expected to deliver a potential improvement of 2-4 orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art free-space gyroscopes for a BEC, and 4-6 orders of magnitude for thermal atoms.
We discuss a scheme to implement a gyroscopic atom sensor with magnetically trapped ultra-cold atoms. Unlike standard light or matter wave Sagnac interferometers no free wave propagation is used. Interferometer operation is controlled only with static, radio-frequency and microwave magnetic fields, which removes the need for interferometric stability of optical laser beams. Due to the confinement of atoms, the scheme may allow the construction of small scale portable sensors. We discuss the main elements of the scheme and report on recent results and efforts towards its experimental realization.