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Acta Physica Polonica A

The Effect of Imperfect Raman Pulses on the Atomic Interference Signal

M.M. Zhao, Y.J. Tan, C.G. Shao

Published Aug 1, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Imperfect Raman pulses can lead to the formation of multiple interfering paths and affect the output of an atom interferometer in high-precision measurement.We study the effect of the imperfect Raman pulses on the interferometric fringe contrast and the phase shift in the three-pulse atom interferometer by using the evolution operator method.Analytical expressions expanded to the second-order fluctuation of imperfect pulses are derived, in which the effect of coupling the imperfect pulses with laser detuning and pulse duration is also considered.The result indicates that the second-order fluctuation of imperfect pulses is dominant, however, it can be nearly ignored in the current requirements of atomic experiments.Even so, theoretical analysis is very necessary as it may be helpful in proposing some schemes to improve the interference efficiency for future high-precision measurements with atomic interferometry.

DOI
10.12693/aphyspola.142.291

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For high-precision atom interferometry gravimeters, the effect of the Raman pulse duration will become an appreciable fraction and need to be taken into account. Its influence has been reported considering a homogeneous Earth’s gravitational field in some previous works. In this paper, by decomposing the time evolution operator into two parts, the free evolution part and the interaction part, we develop an approach to study this effect in a realistic situation where the Earth’s gravitational field is inhomogeneous. A mathematic expression for the interferometer phase shift because of the Raman pulse duration effect is obtained, which shows that the Raman pulse duration should be taken into account when the gravimeter reaches an accuracy of 10−10 g.
Abstract With the rapid development of atom interference technology, multi-loop atom interferometers are widely used in the high-precision measurement of various physical constants and testing of various gravity-related effects. However, in ground-based multi-loop atom interference experiments, the systematic error contribution by classical effects is an important factor that affects the experimental measurement accuracy and gravitational effect detection. Based on this, we used the atomic wave-function evolution-phase accumulation method to provide a high-order interference phase of multi-loop atom interferometers in an inhomogeneous gravitational field containing Earth’s rotation. Furthermore, we propose a new scheme that combines optimised frequency-shift compensation technology with an improved pulse sequence to eliminate systematic errors due to the gravity gradient, Earth’s rotation, and their coupling effect with the pulse duration, as well as the coupling effect of laser detuning with the pulse duration. This study lays a theoretical foundation for experiments on multi-loop atom interferometers with higher precision.
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We investigated the Raman-pulse-duration effect in a gravity gradiometer with two atom interferometers. Since the two atom clouds in the gradiometer experience different gravitational fields, it is hard to compensate for the Doppler shifts of the two clouds simultaneously by chirping the frequency of a common Raman laser. This leads to an appreciable phase shift. The magnitude of the phase shift relative to the differential phase shift of the two interferometers is in an order of $\ensuremath{\tau}/T$, and cannot be neglected in the precision measurements such as measuring the gravity gradient and the Newtonian gravitational constant.