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IEEE International Symposium on Inertial Sensors and Systems (INERTIAL)

System Design of a Cold Atom Gyroscope based on Interfering Matter-wave Solitons

Yogesh Sharad Patil, Hil Fung Harry Cheung, Sunti A. Bhave, Mukund Vengalattore

Published Mar 1, 2020• 2 citations

Abstract

We propose a novel implementation of a trapped- atom Sagnac gyroscope based on the interference between matter- wave solitons confined around an optical microring resonator. Our integrated nanophotonic approach to trapped atom interferometry combines the long-term stability and quantum-limited sensitivity of ultracold matter-wave interferometers with the robustness, scalability and low power operation of nanophotonic architectures. The use of optical microresonators for atomic confinement ensures disorder-free symmetric waveguides for the confined atoms, a high degree of vibration insensitivity owing to the reciprocal structure of the waveguide, and enhanced bias and scale-factor stability via concurrent feedback stabilization of the microresonator. We have performed detailed quantum simulations based on demonstrated experimental parameters to confirm stable dispersion-free propagation of matter-wave solitons around the microresonator and the appearance of high contrast interference fringes due to the accrued Sagnac phase shift. We estimate the shot-noise limited rotation sensitivity of this gyroscope to be 0.8 μrad/s/Hz1/2for single-loop propagation of the solitons around a microring of radius 1 mm, with the possibility of substantial improvements via multiloop propagation of the solitons, fabrication of microring resonators of larger diameter, and the use of quantum-correlated states such as spin- squeezed quantum states. The proposed device illustrates the benefits of harnessing quantum many-body states such as matter- wave solitons for quantum-enhanced inertial sensing applications.

DOI: 10.1109/inertial48129.2020.9090099

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The Sagnac interferometer for angular-velocity metrology is a hot field in precision measurement. How to increase the area of its interference loop is one of its important concerns. In this paper, we design an ultracold-atom gyroscope by using a far-off-resonance, steerable Bessel optical dipole trap. The standing-wave Bragg beams split, reflect, and recombine the Bose–Einstein condensate packets. Concurrently, the Bessel guide drives a helical, quasi-free trajectory. The key advance of our proposal is that optical guiding enables stable multi-orbit operation in a programmable helical waveguide, providing a scalable route to enhance the effective Sagnac area within a compact footprint. As a representative operating point, we show that N =8 turns with R =0.6 mm yield an effective enclosed area A eff ≈72.4 mm 2 and a correspondingly large Sagnac sensitivity. It is a strong candidate for next-generation atom gyroscopes in rotation sensing.

Matter-wave interferometry with atoms propagating in a guiding potential is expected to provide compact, scalable and precise inertial sensing. However, a rotation sensing device based on the Sagnac effect with atoms guided in a ring has not yet been implemented despite continuous efforts during the last two decades. Here we discuss some intrinsic effects that limit the coherence in such a device and propose a scheme that overcomes these limitations and enables a multi-pass guiding Sagnac interferometer with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) on a chip in a ring potential. We analyze crucial dephasing effects: potential roughness, phase diffusion due to atom-atom interactions and number uncertainty, and phase fluctuations. Owing to the recent progress in achieving high momentum beam splitting, creating smooth guides, and manipulating the matter-wavepacket propagation, guided interferometry can be implemented within the coherence time allowed by phase diffusion. Despite the lower particle flux in a guided Sagnac ring and the miniaturization of the interferometer, the estimated sensitivity, for reasonable and practical realizations of an atom chip-based gyroscope, is comparable to that of free-space interferometers, reaching 45 nrads^{-1}Hz^{-1/2}. A significant improvement over state-of-the-art free-space gyrocope sensitivities can be envisioned by using thermal atoms instead of a BEC, whereby the interferometer can be operated in a continuous fashion with the coherence limited by the scattering rate of the atoms with the background gas. Taking into account the sensitivity times length of the interferometer as the figure of merit which takes into account compactness, our configuration is expected to deliver a potential improvement of 2-4 orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art free-space gyroscopes for a BEC, and 4-6 orders of magnitude for thermal atoms.

Confining the propagating wave packets of an atom interferometer inside a waveguide can substantially reduce the size of the device while preserving high sensitivity. We have realized a two-dimensional Sagnac atom interferometer in which Bose-condensed

^{87}\mathrm{Rb}

atoms propagate within a tight waveguide formed by a collimated laser beam, a matter wave analog of the fiber optic gyro. The condensate is split, reflected, and recombined with a series of Bragg pulses while the waveguide moves transversely so that the wave-packet trajectories enclose an area. Delta-kick cooling is used to prepare low-density atomic wave packets with a temperature of

3\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{n}\mathrm{K}

. The low density reduces the impact of interatomic interactions, while the low temperature limits the expansion of the wave packet during the interferometer cycle. The effective enclosed area is

0.8\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{m}{\mathrm{m}}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}

with an average fringe contrast of 20% and underlying contrast up to 60%. The main source of the reduced average contrast is phase noise caused by mechanical vibrations of the optical components. We present a measurement of Allan deviation for such an atom rotation sensor, showing that the interferometer phase noise falls with averaging time $\ensuremath{\tau}$ as ${\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ for $\ensuremath{\tau}$ up to 10 000 seconds. The statistical noise falls below the Earth rotation rate after 30 minutes of averaging.

We propose to develop a new generation of compact high sensitivity gyroscopes using guided matter-waves on atom chips, able to fulfill the requirements of metrological applications. They will be designed to overcome the main limitations of free falling atoms interferometers: interrogation time and quantum projection noise. A cloud of cold 87Rb atoms will be coherently split and constrained to propagate along a circular guide of a few millimeters radius. At the output of the guide an interference signal sensitive to rotation via the Sagnac effect will be measured.

We discuss a scheme to implement a gyroscopic atom sensor with magnetically trapped ultra-cold atoms. Unlike standard light or matter wave Sagnac interferometers no free wave propagation is used. Interferometer operation is controlled only with static, radio-frequency and microwave magnetic fields, which removes the need for interferometric stability of optical laser beams. Due to the confinement of atoms, the scheme may allow the construction of small scale portable sensors. We discuss the main elements of the scheme and report on recent results and efforts towards its experimental realization.

We reports improvements to our Sagnac effect matter-wave interferometer gyroscope. This device now has a short-term rotation-rate sensitivity of 6 × 10 -10 rad s -1 over 1 s of integration, which is the best publicly reported value to date. Stimulated Raman transitions are used to coherently manipulate atoms from counterpropagating thermal beams, forming two interferometers with opposite rotation phase shifts, allowing rotation to be distinguished from acceleration and laser arbitrary phase. Furthermore, electronically compensating the rotation-induced Doppler shifts of the Raman lasers allows operation at an effective zero rotation rate, improving sensitivity and facilitating sensitive lock-in detection readout techniques. Long-term stability is promising but not yet fully characterized. Potential applications include inertial navigation, geophysical studies and tests of general relativity.