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IMPROVED ATOM INTERFEROMETER PERFORMANCE USING COUNTERINTUITIVE STIMULATED RAMAN ADIABATIC PASSAGE

Tatasciore, Branden

Published Dec 1, 2020• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Atom interferometers depend on light/matter interactions and are extremely sensitive sensors capable of being employed as accelerometers, rotation sensors, and gravity and magnetic gradiometers. Typical interferometers use a well-known velocity (generally from atoms launched out of an atomic trap) to interferometrically measure quantities of interest (e.g., acceleration and rotation). This thesis evaluates the effects of atom velocity in an atom interferometer sensor that exists at NPS, which uses a continuous beam of cold rubidium atoms with a narrow but not monochromatic range of velocities passing through continuous laser fields. The atom’s velocity dictates the interaction time between the atom and laser. However, this combination results in pulse errors due to velocity averaging. One method to counteract these pulse errors uses the so-called counterintuitive laser arrangement—a method known as stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP). STIRAP will be shown to be a more robust approach. Starting with the atoms in one of the ground states, all or a portion of the atoms can be transferred to the other ground state in a well-controlled manner. Changes in acceleration and rotation can be sensed with very high precision by a detection laser resulting in applicability as a highly sensitive accelerometer or gyroscope. This project explores experimentally and theoretically the utility of counterintuitive pulse sequences for atom interferometry applications.

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Atom interferometers depend on light/matter interactions and are extremely sensitive sensors capable of being employed as accelerometers, rotation sensors, and gravity and magnetic gradiometers. Typical interferometers use a well-known velocity (generally from atoms launched out of an atomic trap) to interferometrically measure quantities of interest (e.g., acceleration and rotation). This thesis evaluates the effects of atom velocity in an atom interferometer sensor that exists at NPS, which uses a continuous beam of cold rubidium atoms with a narrow but not monochromatic range of velocities passing through continuous laser fields. The atom’s velocity dictates the interaction time between the atom and laser. However, this combination results in pulse errors due to velocity averaging. One method to counteract these pulse errors uses the so-called counterintuitive laser arrangement—a method known as stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP). STIRAP will be shown to be a more robust approach. Starting with the atoms in one of the ground states, all or a portion of the atoms can be transferred to the other ground state in a well-controlled manner. Changes in acceleration and rotation can be sensed with very high precision by a detection laser resulting in applicability as a highly sensitive accelerometer or gyroscope. This project explores experimentally and theoretically the utility of counterintuitive pulse sequences for atom interferometry applications.
The precision of atom interferometry is affected by system errors due to the laser parameters and atomic velocity. We propose the method of the Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage(STIRAP) to enhance the accuracy of the atom interferometry and its tolerance for the environment. We calculate the fidelity of the target atomic state for the cases of the STIRAP technique, rectangular pulse and Gaussian pulse. It is shown that the fidelity of the atomic state obtained with the STIRAP technique is higher than that with rectangular pulse and Gaussian pulse. In addition, higher interference fringe contrast of the atom interferometry can be obtained with the pulse sequence consisting of STIRAP than the rectangular pulse sequence and Gaussian pulse sequence. This scheme may have promising applications in precise measurements with atom interferometry.
High-precision inertial sensing demonstrations with light pulse atom interferometry have typically used Raman pulses having durations orders of magnitude shorter than the dwell time between interferometer pulses. Environmentally robust sensors operating at high-bandwidth will be required to operate at short (millisecond scale) dwell times between Raman pulses. In such an operational mode, the Raman pulse duration becomes an appreciable fraction of the dwell time between pulses. In addition, high-precision inertial sensing applications have typically been demonstrated in mildly dynamic or nondynamic environments having low rate of change of inertial input, ensuring that applied Raman pulses satisfy the Raman resonance condition. Application of nonresonant pulses will be inevitable in sensors registering time-varying inertial input. We present a diagrammatic technique for calculation of atomic output state populations for multipulse atom optics manipulations that explicitly account for the effects of finite pulse duration and finite Raman detuning effects on the laser-induced atomic phase. We analyze several atom interferometer sequences. We report accelerometer and gyroscope phase evolution for fixed Raman laser frequency difference incorporating corrections in powers of the ratio of pulse duration to time interval between interferometer pulses. Our accelerometer result agrees with other published results.
The presented thesis describes the setting up of an inertial sensitive atom interferometer for navigation using Rubidium 87 atoms, which is able to perform horizontal acceleration measurement. An ultra-high vacuum interferometer chamber is designed and built. The cold atoms are prepared in a compact 2D MOT setup and loaded into the main MOT. These atoms are then cooled down to few K and prepared in a magnetically insensitive ground state using a sequence of optical and microwave pulses, after which atoms are selected in a narrow band of the velocity. A three-pulse Mach-Zehnder ( pi/2 -pi-pi/2) interferometer using stimulated Raman transitions is used to measure the horizontal acceleration. To improve the sensitivity to acceleration, the fringe contrast of the interferometer requires to be optimised. By investigating the intensity profile of the Raman beams using atoms, a procedure is developed to operate the interferometer in an improved condition, which is able to enhance the fringe contrast by a factor of 3. This procedure improves the shot-to-shot sensitivity of the interferometer below 5 um/s^2. In addition, the atom interferometer is compared with a classical state-of-the-art accelerometer.
We demonstrate a closed-loop light-pulse atom-interferometer inertial sensor that can realize continuous decoupled measurements of acceleration and rotation rate. The sensor operates with double-loop atom interferometers, which share the same Raman light pulses in a spatially separated Mach-Zehnder configuration and use continuous cold atomic beams propagating in opposite directions from two 2D+{\text{2D}}^{+}2D+ magneto-optical trappings. Acceleration and the rotation rate are decoupled and simultaneously measured by the sum and difference of dual-atom-interferometer signals, respectively. The sensitivities of inertial measurements are also increased to be approximately 1.86 times higher than that of a single atom interferometer. The acceleration phase shift is compensated in real time by phase locking these interferometers via the Raman laser phases from the sum-interferometer signal, and the gyroscope performance is improved. We achieve long-term stabilities of $6.1\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\text{\ensuremath{\mu}}\text{g}$ and 840 nrad/s for the acceleration and the rotation rate, respectively, using a short interrogation time of 0.87 ms (interference area A=0.097mm2A=0.097\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}{\text{mm}}^{2}A=0.097mm2). This work provides a building block for an atomic interferometer-based inertial measurement unit for use in field applications that require a high data rate and high stability.
Matter-wave interferometry has enabled high precision measurements of inertial forces such as gravity and the Coriolis force. This is facilitated by the long-term stability of the physical properties of atoms and lasers. Recent experiments have demonstrated the operation of portable, robust sensors using atom interferometry. This has potential uses in the context of inertial navigation, where conventional devices suffer from long-term drifts due to bias instability. Furthermore, determining position via dead reckoning requires minimisation of dead time between measurements. This thesis presents the development of an atom interferometer for measuring horizontal accelerations. In this configuration, gravity induces motion across the laser wavefront, which constrains the tolerable level of wavefront distortions. Effective control of the experiment allows the interferometer to be operated at a rate of 4 Hz. A cold ensemble of 10^6 atoms in the same internal state is prepared in 150 ms. The interferometer operates using a sequence of three laser pulses separated by T= 25 ms to achieve sensitivity to horizontal accelerations. Combining this with a classical accelerometer provides a method of correcting for vibration-induced noise, as well as determining the interferometer fringe order. After an integration time of 40 s, the sensitivity to horizontal accelerations is better than 3^-6 m s^-2. Effects which limit this sensitivity are discussed.
A rotation-rate sensor was developed using atom interferometry and the Sagnac effect for matter waves. This device has a short-term sensitivity of 6× 10−10 rad/sec for a 1 second integration time, which is the best publicly reported value to date. It has high intrinsic accuracy because it relies on interactions between atoms and laser light that is stabilized to an atomic transition. Long-term stability is promising and characterization is currently underway. Potential applications include inertial navigation, geophysical studies, and general relativity tests such as verification of the Lense-Thirring and geodetic effects. The principle of operation is as follows: A thermal cesium atomic beam crosses three laser interaction regions where two-photon stimulated Raman transitions between cesium ground states transfer momentum to atoms and divide, deflect, and recombine the atomic wavepackets. Rotation induces a phase shift between the two possible trajectories and causes a change in the detected number of atoms with a particular internal state. Counterpropagating atomic beams form two interferometers using shared lasers for common-mode rejection, and the rotation phase shifts have opposite sign since the phase shift is proportional to the vector velocity of the atoms. Therefore, subtracting or adding the interferometer signals discriminates between rotation and transverse acceleration summed with laser arbitrary phase. Furthermore, in the inertial reference frame of the atoms, rotations Doppler-shift the Raman lasers. Adding Raman frequency shifts to cancel these Doppler-shifts allows operation at an effective zero rotation rate, improving sensitivity and bandwidth. Modulating these frequency shifts facilitates sensitive lock-in detection readout techniques.