High resolution rotation sensor based on cold atom interferometry

Arnaud Landragin, Matteo Altorio, Romain Gautier +2 more

Chengyin Han, Bo Lü, Chaohong Lee

The utilization of Ramsey interferometry via coherent population trapping (CPT), which enables the optical interrogation of microwave transitions without the reliance on microwave cavities, plays a crucial role in the advancement of compact and low-power quantum sensors. Particularly, high-resolution CPT-Ramsey spectroscopy of alkali-metal atoms has found extensive application in constructing miniaturized quantum sensors like atomic magnetometers and atomic clocks. Due to their well-defined environment and extended coherence time, cold atoms offer enhanced sensitivity and precision in CPT-Ramsey interferometry. This review comprehensively examines CPT-Ramsey interferometry with cold atoms, encompassing both conventional and multi-pulse techniques, and explores their potential applications in practical quantum sensors.

Si-Bin Lu, Jiahao Fu, Min Jiang +9 more

Atom interferometry shows high sensitivity for inertial measurements in the laboratory, but it faces difficulties in field applications because of a trade-off between sensitivity and size. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a small sensor with high resolution for measuring acceleration and rotation in inertial navigation applications. Presented here is a miniaturized inertial sensor capable of measuring acceleration and rotation simultaneously based on high-resolution dual atom interferometers. A sensor head is integrated within a volume of 100 l, in which the vacuum chambers are fabricated by bonding quartz-glass windows with epoxy resin. A photoelectric cabinet is composed of four 3U rack units by integrating optical modules and electronic units. Dual atom interference fringes with a contrast of 29% are observed, and the acceleration and rotation are measured simultaneously by extracting their phase shifts. By developing a temperature compensation method to eliminate phase drifts caused by the thermal deformation of the Raman mirrors and using wave vector reversal to eliminate the phase drifts independent of the direction of the wave vector, measurement resolutions of 40 ng at 518 s and 6.1 nrad/s at 10 880 s are achieved for acceleration and rotation, respectively, from Allan deviations.

Romain Gautier, Leonid A. Sidorenkov, Matteo Altorio +2 more

Michael Gilowski, Christian Schubert, Thijs Wendrich +4 more

We report on our compact transportable cold atom inertial sensor for precision sensing of rotations. The sensor consists of a dual Mach-Zehnder type atom interferometer operating with laser-cooled87Rb. Raman processes are employed to coherently manipulate the matter waves. We present the latest inertial sensitive interferometer measurements and discuss the road map to reach the full potential of the sensor featuring a sensitivity of a few nrad/s/radic(Hz).

Tim Freegarde, Mohammad Belal, Max Carey +3 more