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Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements

Dependence of scale factor on initial cloud size for an atom-ball gyroscope

Bruno Pelle, Gregory W. Hoth, Stefan Riedl, Elizabeth A. Donley, John E. Kitching

Published Jul 1, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an atom interferometer based on an expanding cloud of laser-cooled atoms sensitive to 2-axis rotations and 1-axis acceleration in an effective volume of 1 cm3. We observed spatially resolved fringes by imaging the expanding cloud after short free-fall durations. If the atom cloud does not start as a point source, a bias is introduced in the scale factor that differs from the simple point-source limit. We explored the scale factor deviation experimentally with different initial cloud sizes and will present our understanding of this important systematic.

DOI
10.1109/cpem.2016.7540553

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We present an atom interferometer based on an expanding cloud of laser-cooled atoms sensitive to 2-axis rotations and 1-axis acceleration in an effective volume of 1 cm3. We observed spatially resolved fringes by imaging the expanding cloud after short free-fall durations. If the atom cloud does not start as a point source, a bias is introduced in the scale factor that differs from the simple point-source limit. We explored the scale factor deviation experimentally with different initial cloud sizes and will present our understanding of this important systematic.
We present an atom interferometer based on an expanding cloud of laser-cooled atoms sensitive to rotations along two axes and acceleration along one axis in an effective volume of 1 cm3. We observed spatially resolved fringes created by the apparatus' rotation by imaging the expanding cloud after short free-fall durations. If the atom cloud does not start as a point source, a bias is introduced in the scale factor that differs from the simple point-source limit. We explored the scale factor deviation experimentally with different initial cloud sizes and present our understanding of this important systematic.
We demonstrate a two axis gyroscope by the use of light pulse atom interferometry with an expanding cloud of atoms in the regime where the cloud has expanded by 1.1–5 times its initial size during the interrogation. Rotations are measured by analyzing spatial fringe patterns in the atom population obtained by imaging the final cloud. The fringes arise from a correlation between an atom's initial velocity and its final position. This correlation is naturally created by the expansion of the cloud, but it also depends on the initial atomic distribution. We show that the frequency and contrast of these spatial fringes depend on the details of the initial distribution and develop an analytical model to explain this dependence. We also discuss several challenges that must be overcome to realize a high-performance gyroscope with this technique.
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Point source atom interferometry (PSI) uses the velocity distribution in a cold atom cloud to simultaneously measure one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from the spatial distribution of interferometer phase in an expanded cloud of atoms. Previously, the interferometer phase has been found from the phase, orientation, and period of the resulting spatial atomic interference fringe images. For practical applications in inertial sensing and precision measurement, it is important to be able to measure a wide range of system rotation rates, corresponding to interferograms with far less than one full interference fringe to very many fringes. Interferogram analysis techniques based on image processing used previously for PSI are challenging to implement for low rotation rates that generate less than one full interference fringe across the cloud. We introduce a new experimental method that is closely related to optical phase-shifting interferometry that is effective in extracting rotation values from signals consisting of fractional fringes as well as many fringes without prior knowledge of the rotation rate. The method finds the interferometer phase for each pixel in the image from four interferograms, each with a controlled Raman laser phase shift, to reconstruct the underlying atomic interferometer phase map without image processing.
Point source atom interferometry, employing optical Raman pulses and a cold atom source, enables measurements of rotation and acceleration in a compact experimental package. This system is uniquely sensitive to rotations in the plane perpendicular to the Raman beamline. Here we discuss our experiment’s sensitivity, stability, systematic errors, and other performance-limiting factors both fundamentaland technical. Our current measurements for the sensitivity to the magnitude and direction of the rotation vector are 0.6 mrad/s and 5 mrad, respectively.
Point source atom interferometry (PSI) uses the velocity distribution in a cold atom cloud to simultaneously measure one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from the spatial distribution of interferometer phase in an expanded cloud of atoms. Previously, the interferometer phase has been found from the phase, orientation, and period of the resulting spatial atomic interference fringe images. For practical applications in inertial sensing and precision measurement, it is important to be able to measure a wide range of system rotation rates, corresponding to interferograms with far less than one full interference fringe to very many fringes. Interferogram analysis techniques based on image processing used previously for PSI are challenging to implement for low rotation rates that generate less than one full interference fringe across the cloud. We introduce a new experimental method that is closely related to optical phase-shifting interferometry that is effective in extracting rotation values from signals consisting of fractional fringes as well as many fringes without prior knowledge of the rotation rate. The method finds the interferometer phase for each pixel in the image from four interferograms, each with a controlled Raman laser phase shift, to reconstruct the underlying atomic interferometer phase map without image processing.