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Physical Review Letters

Multimode Kapitza-Dirac Interferometry with Trapped Cold Atoms

Weidong Li, Tianchen He, Augusto Smerzi

Published Jul 7, 2014• 31 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We design a multimode interferometer with cold atoms confined in a harmonic trap. A first Kapitza-Dirac pulse creates several spatially addressable modes which are coherently recombined by the harmonic potential and mixed again by a second Kapitza-Dirac pulse. A phase shift among the mode is estimated by fitting the density profile or by measuring the number of atoms in each output mode. The expected sensitivity is rigorously calculated with the Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao lower bound. For the measurement of the gravitational acceleration g we predict, with typical parameters of a compact setup, a temperature independent sensitivity which can exceed, by several orders of magnitude, the sensitivity of current atomic interferometers.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.113.023003

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We design a multimode interferometer with cold atoms confined in a harmonic trap. A first Kapitza-Dirac pulse creates several spatially addressable modes which are coherently recombined by the harmonic potential and mixed again by a second Kapitza-Dirac pulse. A phase shift among the mode is estimated by fitting the density profile or by measuring the number of atoms in each output mode. The expected sensitivity is rigorously calculated with the Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao lower bound. For the measurement of the gravitational acceleration g we predict, with typical parameters of a compact setup, a temperature independent sensitivity which can exceed, by several orders of magnitude, the sensitivity of current atomic interferometers.
We theoretically analyse a multi-modes atomic interferometer consisting of a sequence of Kapitza-Dirac pulses (KD) applied to cold atoms trapped in a harmonic trap. The pulses spatially split the atomic wave-functions while the harmonic trap coherently recombines all modes by acting as a coherent spatial mirror. The phase shifts accumulated among different KD pulses are estimated by measuring the number of atoms in each output mode or by fitting the density profile. The sensitivity is rigorously calculated by the Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao lower bound. We predict, with typical experimental parameters, a temperature independent sensitivity which, in the case of the measurement of the gravitational constant g can significantly exceed the sensitivity of current atomic interferometers.
The interferometry of two Kapitza-Dirac (KD) pulses acting on cold atoms in a harmonic oscillator potential well is investigated by Feynman path integral method. The wave function and density distribution function of the system at a given time are calculated analytically by using the propagator under the action of an external field. The first KD pulse acts on cold atoms to produce a large number of modes in the harmonic oscillator potential well. The maximum value of wave packet of mode 0 is larger than those of other modes. These modes evolve along different paths. The external field changes the phase of each mode and makes the evolution path of the mode deviate from that without the external field. When the second KD pulse is added, it splits the mode of the first KD pulse, and thus generates more modes. These modes will evolve along different paths under the action of external field and harmonic potential well, and interfere with each other. At the moment of measurement, all the wave packets are separated without overlapping. The effect of the external field does not change the magnitude of the density distribution at the time of measurement, but makes the wave packet of each mode shift. The phase difference between adjacent modes decreases linearly with the increase of field intensity. When the external field is a gravity field, we calculate the Fisher information and the Cramer-Rao lowér bound. The Fisher information is proportional to the mass of atoms and inversely to the third power of harmonic potential well frequency. We can improve the measurement accuracy of interferometer by reducing the frequency of harmonic potential well and increasing atomic mass. When the initial state is the ground state of the harmonic potential well, the accuracy of the gravity acceleration measured by the interference device can be obtained to be 10–9 by using the experimental parameters. The initial state is the ground state of the harmonic potential well and the external field, and the calculation result indicates that the measurement accuracy will decrease. At the same time, the enhancement of inter-atomic repulsion and attraction interaction will also lead the measurement accuracy to increase.
We experimentally demonstrate a multimode interferometer comprising a Bose-Einstein condensate of 39K^{39}\mathrm{K}39K atoms trapped in a harmonic potential, where the interatomic interaction can be canceled exploiting Feshbach resonances. Kapitza-Dirac diffraction from an optical lattice coherently splits the BEC in multiple momentum components equally spaced that form different interferometric paths, with trajectories closed by the trapping harmonic potential. We investigate two different interferometric schemes, where the recombination pulse is applied after a full or half oscillation in the confining potential. We find that the relative amplitudes of the momentum components at the interferometer output are sensitive to external forces, through the induced displacement of the harmonic potential with respect to the optical lattice. We show how to calibrate the interferometer, fully characterize its output, and discuss perspective improvements.
We demonstrate two atom interferometric schemes based on Kapitza-Dirac scattering in a magnetic trap. In the first method, two Kapitza-Dirac scattering pulses are applied with a small time delay between them. High contrast interference is observed both using a thermal cloud and a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In the second method, two Kapitza-Dirac scattering pulses are applied to a BEC with a time separation sufficiently large that the interfering orders complete half an oscillation in the magnetic trap; this enables interferometry between spatially separated paths.
We introduce a quantum interferometric scheme that uses states that are sharp in frequency and delocalized in position. The states are frequency modes of a quantum field that is trapped at all times in a finite volume potential, such as a small box potential. This allows for significant miniaturization of interferometric devices. Since the modes are in contact at all times, it is possible to estimate physical parameters of global multimode channels. As an example, we introduce a three-mode scheme and calculate precision bounds in the estimation of parameters of two-mode Gaussian channels. This scheme can be implemented in several systems, including superconducting circuits, cavity-QED, and cold atoms. We consider a concrete implementation using the ground state and two phononic modes of a trapped Bose–Einstein condensate. We apply this to show that frequency interferometry can improve the sensitivity of phononic gravitational waves detectors by several orders of magnitude, even in the case that squeezing is much smaller than assumed previously, and that the system suffers from short phononic lifetimes. Other applications range from magnetometry, gravimetry, and gradiometry to dark matter/energy searches.