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arXiv:2305.06495 · Physical Review A

Sequential large momentum transfer exploiting rectangular Raman pulses

B. Dubetsky

Published Dec 8, 2023• 1 citation
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Abstract

It is proposed to use rectangular Raman pulses for the technique of sequential large momentum transfer. It is shown that the small parameters that make it possible to use this technology for precision atom interferometry can be 40--200 times smaller than in the case of the Bragg regime. It is predicted that in the case of a nonequidistant timing of auxiliary pulses, one can observe oscillations in time of the interference picture with a period inversely proportional to the recoil frequency. Such an observation would be confirmation that Mach-Zehnder atom interference is a phenomenon caused by the quantization of the atomic center-of-mass motion. This effect is calculated for any shape of pulses. One can observe it in the Bragg regime as well. It is proposed to use noncontinuous composite Raman pulses as auxiliary beam splitters so that the effective Rabi frequency remains unchanged for the entire process. The gravity phase of an atomic interferometer is calculated for any shape, duration, and timing of Raman pulses, including the Bragg regime. The phase corrections caused by the finite pulses' durations are also calculated for the rectangular Raman pulse shape.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.063308

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It is proposed to use rectangular Raman pulses for the technique of sequential large momentum transfer. It is shown that the small parameters that make it possible to use this technology for precision atom interferometry can be 40--200 times smaller than in the case of the Bragg regime. It is predicted that in the case of a nonequidistant timing of auxiliary pulses, one can observe oscillations in time of the interference picture with a period inversely proportional to the recoil frequency. Such an observation would be confirmation that Mach-Zehnder atom interference is a phenomenon caused by the quantization of the atomic center-of-mass motion. This effect is calculated for any shape of pulses. One can observe it in the Bragg regime as well. It is proposed to use noncontinuous composite Raman pulses as auxiliary beam splitters so that the effective Rabi frequency remains unchanged for the entire process. The gravity phase of an atomic interferometer is calculated for any shape, duration, and timing of Raman pulses, including the Bragg regime. The phase corrections caused by the finite pulses' durations are also calculated for the rectangular Raman pulse shape.
In a retroreflective scheme with an atom initially at rest, atomic Raman diffraction adopts some of the properties of Bragg diffraction due to additional couplings to off-resonant momenta. As a consequence, double Raman diffraction has to be performed in a Bragg-type regime, where the pulse duration is sufficiently long to suppress diffraction into spurious orders. Taking advantage of this regime, double Raman allows for resonant higher-order diffraction. We study theoretically the case of third-order diffraction and compare it to first order as well as a sequence of first-order Raman pulses giving rise to the same momentum transfer as the third-order pulse. Moreover, we demonstrate that interferometry is possible, and we investigate amplitude and contrast of a third-order double Raman Mach-Zehnder interferometer. In fact, third-order diffraction constitutes a competitive tool for the diffraction of ultracold atoms and interferometry based on large momentum transfer since it allows one to reduce the complexity of the experiment as well as the total duration of the diffraction process compared to a sequence, at the cost of higher pulse intensities.
We present up to 24-photon Bragg diffraction as a beam splitter in light-pulse atom interferometers to achieve the largest splitting in momentum space so far. Relative to the 2-photon processes used in the most sensitive present interferometers, these large momentum transfer beam splitters increase the phase shift 12-fold for Mach-Zehnder (MZ) and 144-fold for Ramsey-Bordé (RB) geometries. We achieve a high visibility of the interference fringes (up to 52% for MZ or 36% for RB) and long pulse separation times that are possible only in atomic fountain setups. As the atom's internal state is not changed, important systematic effects can cancel.
A new approach to the theory of atoms' interaction with chirped Raman pulses is developed. When the pulses have sufficiently close effective wave lengths, which are smaller than the atomic cloud size, equations for the family of the matrix elements of the atomic density matrix in the Wigner representation are derived. The solution, involving linear (in the pulse duration) phase corrections, is obtained for the rectangular pulse. The interferometric part of the atoms' excitation is calculated.
We report here on the realization of light-pulse atom interferometers with large-momentum-transfer atom optics based on a sequence of Bragg transitions. We demonstrate momentum splitting up to 200 photon recoils in an ultracold atom interferometer. We highlight a new mechanism of destructive interference of the losses leading to a sizable efficiency enhancement of the beam splitters. We perform a comprehensive study of parasitic interferometers due to the inherent multiport feature of the quasi-Bragg pulses. Finally, we experimentally verify the phase shift enhancement and characterize the interferometer visibility loss.
Large-momentum-transfer (LMT) atom interferometry provides a route toward enhanced inertial sensitivity in compact quantum sensors, but its scalability is limited by the accumulation of pulse-transfer errors across long Raman pulse sequences. We investigate theoretically the use of stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage (STIRSAP) for high-fidelity LMT atom optics in a Mach--Zehnder interferometer geometry. The counterdiabatic correction is encoded directly into the Raman pulse envelopes, eliminating the need for auxiliary microwave or radio-frequency control fields. Numerical simulations based on an effective Raman model show that 1 μs1~μ\mathrm{s}1 μs STIRSAP pulses achieve single-pulse transfer fidelities of Fπ=0.99902F_π= 0.99902Fπ​=0.99902 while maintaining negligible pulse-time overhead even at high momentum order. We analyze the resulting tradeoff between interferometric phase enhancement and compound contrast decay and identify an unconstrained shot-noise optimum near n≈270n\approx270n≈270. The analysis further shows that practical operation at extreme LMT order is constrained by wave-packet separation, vibration noise, Doppler detuning, and accumulated systematic effects rather than by pulse duration itself. These results establish superadiabatic Raman control as a promising approach for scalable high-fidelity atom optics and clarify the physical limitations governing compact high-order atom interferometers.
A point source interferometer (PSI) is a device where atoms are split and recombined by applying a temporal sequence of Raman pulses. During the pulse sequence, an initially trapped cloud of cold atoms is released and allowed to expand, behaving approximately as a point source. The PSI can work as a sensitive multi-axes gyroscope that can automatically filter out the signal from accelerations. The phase shift arising from rotations is proportional to the momentum transferred to each atom from the Raman pulses. Therefore, by increasing the momentum transfer, it should be possibly to enhance the sensitivity of the PSI. Here, we investigate the degree of enhancement in sensitivity that could be achieved by augmenting the PSI with large momentum transfer (LMT) employing a sequence of many Raman pulses with alternating directions. Contrary to typical approaches used for describing a PSI, we employ a model under which the motion of the center of mass of each atom is described quantum mechanically. We show how increasing Doppler shifts lead to imperfections, thereby limiting the visibility of the signal fringes, and identify ways to suppress this effect by increasing the effective, two-photon Rabi frequencies of the Raman pulses. Considering the effect of spontaneous emission, we show that for a given value of the one-photon Rabi frequency, there is an optimum value for the number of pulses employed, beyond which the net enhancement in sensitivity begins to decrease. For a one-photon Rabi frequency of 200 MHz, for example, the peak value of the factor of enhancement in sensitivity is ~39, for a momentum transfer that is ~69 times as large as that for a conventional PSI. We also find that this peak value scales as the one-photon Rabi frequency to the power of 4/5.