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Physica Scripta

Improved frequency shift compensation technique and pulse sequence for multi-loop atom interference experiments

Ya-Jie Wang, Xiaoyu Lu, Jiao Zhang, Kexin Wang, Jianfeng Su, Shan Feng, Dahu Chang, Qiubo Hu, Chunjuan Tang

Published Aug 19, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1088/1402-4896/ad70fc

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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.
Abstract With the rapid development of atom interferometry, atom interferometers have been widely used in inertial navigation, resource exploration, basic physics and other fields. For precise measurement experiments with multi-loop atom interferometer configuration, it is urgent to establish a high-precision theoretical model charactering the relationship between target measurement quantities and measurement results. Based on this, we adopt the idea of co-moving reference frame, so as to transfer the gravity, gravity gradient and Earth’s rotation effects to the laser light field interacting with atoms by translating, rotating and stretching the background spacetime. With this method, we not only can simplify the analysis process of the experimental principle, but also give the analytical results of the high-order interference phase of the multi-loop atom interferometer containing the gravity gradient and Earth’s rotation. This work will lay a certain theoretical foundation for higher-precision experiment, and will also help to clearly guide the implementation of the experiment.
Abstract Since the double-loop atom interferometer consisting of Raman π 2 − π − π − π 2 four-pulse sequences can eliminate the dependence of the interferometric phase shift on the atomic initial velocity, it is widely used for rotation measurements. However, our research shows that by coupling itself with both the atomic initial velocity and the laser detuning, the short pulse duration can contribute to unknown systematic errors within the current instrument sensitivity. The coupling of the pulse duration with the laser detuning inside the device is verified experimentally and presented in this work. An improved pulse sequence design is developed to eliminate these systematic errors and improve the precision of the rotation measurements.
Although frequency-shift gravity-gradient compensation is currently the technique with the most potential to test the weak equivalence principle with atom interferometry at high precision, it faces an unavoidable obstacle on how to cancel the coupling between the Raman-pulse-duration effect and the gravity gradient related to the atomic initial kinematics. According to the Einstein equivalence principle, we develop a method to calculate this coupling effect in a space-stretching free-falling frame, based on which an improved frequency-shift gravity-gradient compensation technique is put forward to make high-accuracy weak-equivalence-principle tests with the microscopic particles, such as at the level of ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}14}$, more possible.
Gravity gradients represent a major obstacle in high-precision measurements by atom interferometry. Controlling their effects to the required stability and accuracy imposes very stringent requirements on the relative positioning of freely falling atomic clouds, as in the case of precise tests of Einstein's equivalence principle. We demonstrate a new method to exactly compensate the effects introduced by gravity gradients in a Raman-pulse atom interferometer. By shifting the frequency of the Raman lasers during the central π pulse, it is possible to cancel the initial position- and velocity-dependent phase shift produced by gravity gradients. We apply this technique to simultaneous interferometers positioned along the vertical direction and demonstrate a new method for measuring local gravity gradients that does not require precise knowledge of the relative position between the atomic clouds. Based on this method, we also propose an improved scheme to determine the Newtonian gravitational constant G towards the 10 ppm relative uncertainty.
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.
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.