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European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC)

Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms : a tool for a h/m/sub Rb/ measurement

Pierre Cladé, Saïda Guellati-Khélifa, Catherine Schwob, F. Nez, Lucile Julien, F. Biraben

Published Jan 18, 2006• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The experimental measurement of the recoil velocity of ultracold rubidium atoms is performed. Bloch oscillations in vertical standing wave have been also studied.
DOI
10.1109/eqec.2005.1567404

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We use Bloch oscillations in a horizontal moving standing wave to transfer a large number of photon recoils to atoms with a high efficiency (99.5% per cycle). By measuring the photon recoil of 87Rb, using velocity-selective Raman transitions to select a subrecoil velocity class and to measure the final accelerated velocity class, we have determined h/m(Rb) with a relative precision of 0.4 ppm. To exploit the high momentum transfer efficiency of our method, we are developing a vertical standing wave setup. This will allow us to measure h/m(Rb) better than 10(-8) and hence the fine structure constant alpha with an uncertainty close to the most accurate value coming from the (g-2) determination.
We show that Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice are a strong tool to measure accurately some physical constants. We describe in this paper two experimental approaches using a pure and an accelerated vertical standing waves to perform respectively a determination of the local acceleration of gravity ggg to ppm precision and of the fine structure constant α\alphaα with a relative uncertainty of 6,7 ppb.
In Paris, we are using an atom interferometer to precisely measure the recoil velocity of an atom that absorbs a photon. In order to reach a high sensitivity, many recoils are transferred to atoms using the Bloch oscillations technique. In this lecture, I will present in details this technique and its application to high precision measurement. I will especially describe in details how this method allows us to perform an atom recoil measurement at the level of 1.3×10−91.3 \times 10^{-9}1.3×10−9. This measurement is used in the most precise determination of the fine structure constant that is independent of quantum electrodynamics.
We report on the observation of Bloch oscillations on the unprecedented time scale of several seconds. The experiment is carried out with ultracold bosonic 88Sr atoms loaded into a vertical optical standing wave. The negligible atom-atom elastic cross section and zero angular momentum in the ground state makes 88Sr an almost ideal Bose gas, insensitive to typical mechanisms of decoherence due to thermalization and external stray fields. The small size of the system enables precision measurements of forces at micrometer scale. This is a challenge in physics for studies of surfaces, Casimir effects, and searches for deviations from Newtonian gravity predicted by theories beyond the standard model.