Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)
Cold-atom inertial sensor without deadtime
Bess Fang, Denis Savoie, N. Mielec, Indranil Dutta, Bertrand Venon, Carlos L. Garrido Alzar, Rémi Geiger, Arnaud Landragin
Abstract
We report the operation of a cold-atom inertial sensor in a joint interrogation scheme, where we simultaneously prepare a cold-atom source and operate an atom interferometer in order to eliminate dead times [1]. This is illustrated in Fig. 1. Dead times and noise aliasing are consequences of the sequential operation which is intrinsic to cold-atom interferometers. Both phenomena have deleterious effects on the performance of these sensors. We show that our continuous operation improves the short-term sensitivity of atom interferometers, by demonstrating a record rotation sensitivity of 100 nrad.s-1/√Hz in a cold-atom gyroscope of 11 cm2Sagnac area. We also demonstrate a rotation stability of 1 nrad.s-1after 104s of integration, improving previous results by an order of magnitude [2-4]. We expect that the continuous operation will allow cold-atom inertial sensors with long interrogation time to reach their full sensitivity, determined by the quantum noise limit.