Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms

Pierre Cladé, M. Himbert, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, France

Pierre Cladé, Saïda Guellati-Khélifa, Catherine Schwob +3 more

The experimental measurement of the recoil velocity of ultracold rubidium atoms is performed. Bloch oscillations in vertical standing wave have been also studied.

Pierre Cladé, Malo Cadoret, Estefania de Mirandés +5 more

We show that Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice are a strong tool to measure accurately some physical constants. We describe in this paper two experimental approaches using a pure and an accelerated vertical standing waves to perform respectively a determination of the local acceleration of gravity $g$ to ppm precision and of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ with a relative uncertainty of 6,7 ppb.

Saïda Guellati-Khélifa, Pierre Cladé, Estefania de Mirandés +5 more

Roberto Onofrio, Luca Salasnich

Iacopo Carusotto, Лев П. Питаевский, S. Stringari +2 more

We show that Bloch oscillations of ultracold fermionic atoms in the periodic potential of an optical lattice can be used for a sensitive measurement of forces at the micrometer length scale, e.g., in the vicinity of a dielectric surface. In particular, the proposed approach allows us to perform a local and direct measurement of the Casimir-Polder force which is, for realistic experimental parameters, as large as 10(-4) gravity.