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Acta Physica Sinica

Measurement of gravity acceleration by cold atoms in a harmonic trap using Kapitza-Dirac pulses

Tian-Chen He, Ji Li

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.7498/aps.68.20190749

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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 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.
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.
Ultra-cold atoms provide ideal platforms for interferometry. The macroscopic matter-wave property of ultra-cold atoms leads to large coherent length and long coherent time, which enable high accuracy and sensitivity to measurement. Here, we review our efforts to improve the performance of the interferometer. We demonstrate a shortcut method for manipulating ultra-cold atoms in an optical lattice. Compared with traditional ones, this shortcut method can reduce the manipulation time by up to three orders of magnitude. We construct a matter-wave Ramsey interferometer for trapped motional quantum states and significantly increase its coherence time by one order of magnitude with an echo technique based on this method. Efforts have also been made to enhance the resolution by multimode scheme. Application of a noise-resilient multi-component interferometer shows that increasing the number of paths could sharpen the peaks in the time-domain interference fringes, which leads to a resolution nearly twice compared with that of a conventional double-path two-mode interferometer. With the shortcut method mentioned above, improvement of the momentum resolution could also be fulfilled, which leads to atomic momentum patterns less than 0.6 ℏkL . To identify and remove systematic noises, we introduce the methods based on the principal component analysis (PCA) that reduce the noise in detection close to the 1 / 2 of the photon-shot noise and separate and identify or even eliminate noises. Furthermore, we give a proposal to measure precisely the local gravity acceleration within a few centimeters based on our study of ultracold atoms in precision measurements.
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.
Atom interferometry gravimeter with stimulated Raman transitions is realized by atom matter wave, it is now widely used in gravity measurements. We are now building a feasible system of cold atom gravimeter, it is based on the atom interferometry technology by coherently manipulating the cold atoms in a fountain with specific Raman lasers, the cold atom wave packet is splitted, combined, and then re-splitted in the process. Then the atomic wave packet will acquire different phase because of the different evolution path. The precise acceleration can be deduced through the precision measurement of atomic interference fringes phase, and this will be a high precision standard of acceleration. At present, the preparation of Raman laser and the precise control of the laser Frequency have been finished, and they have been proved to meet the requirements of the experiment.
Cold atom interferometer is sensitive to both gravity and rotation.In order to measure the two parameters respectively,by exerting several horizontal Raman pulses in multiple time-domains on cold atom clouds,we realize the cold atom splitting was realized,and the difference of atom velocity was increased.Then by extending vertical sequences of Raman pulses to cold atoms,two sub-interferometers with different mean velocity of atoms were achieved.Based on the principle of interferometry phase shift that is related to rotation but not acceleration,two measure methods were presented.One makes the mean horizontal velocity of some atoms zero,the other makes the direction of mean horizontal velocity of two parts opposite.Theory analysis and calculation show that it can measure gravity and rotation respectively based on experiment data.