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arXiv:quant-ph/0604028

Phase noise due to vibrations in Mach-Zehnder atom interferometers

Alain Miffre, Marion Jacquey, M Büchner, G. Trénec, J. Vigué

Published Apr 5, 2006• 6 citations
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Abstract

Atom interferometers are very sensitive to accelerations and rotations. This property, which has some very interesting applications, induces a deleterious phase noise due to the seismic noise of the laboratory and this phase noise is sufficiently large to reduce the fringe visibility in many experiments. We develop a model calculation of this phase noise in the case of Mach-Zehnder atom interferometers and we apply this model to our thermal lithium interferometer. We are able to explain the observed phase noise which has been detected through the rapid dependence of the fringe visibility with the diffraction order. We think that the dynamical model developed in the present paper should be very useful to reduce the vibration induced phase noise in atom interferometers, making many new experiments feasible.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0604028

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Atom interferometers are very sensitive to accelerations and rotations. This property, which has some very interesting applications, induces a deleterious phase noise due to the seismic noise of the laboratory and this phase noise is sufficiently large to reduce the fringe visibility in many experiments. We develop a model calculation of this phase noise in the case of Mach-Zehnder atom interferometers and we apply this model to our thermal lithium interferometer. We are able to explain the observed phase noise which has been detected through the rapid dependence of the fringe visibility with the diffraction order. We think that the dynamical model developed in the present paper should be very useful to reduce the vibration induced phase noise in atom interferometers, making many new experiments feasible.
The high inertial sensitivity of atom interferometers has been used to build accelerometers and gyrometers but this sensitivity makes these interferometers very sensitive to the laboratory seismic noise. This seismic noise induces a phase noise which is large enough to reduce the fringe visibility in many cases. We develop here a model calculation of this phase noise in the case of Mach-Zehnder atom interferometers and we apply this model to our thermal lithium interferometer. We are thus able to explain the observed dependence of the fringe visibility with the diffraction order. The dynamical model developed in the present paper should be very useful to further reduce this phase noise in atom interferometers and this reduction should open the way to improved interferometers.
\nWe have built an atom interferometer of the Mach-Zehnder type, operating with thermal lithium atoms [1]. Its design is largely inspired by previous works done by the groups of D. Pritchard [2], A. Zeilinger [3] and S.A. Lee [4]. In our apparatus, the atomic wave is diffracted in the Bragg regime by three laser sanding waves to achieve a Mach-Zehnder configuration. This paper briefly recalls the diffraction process and shows the experimental results obtained in our group. Our apparatus is able to achieve a high fringe contrast of 74 % with a large mean detected atom flux of 1.5times1041.5 \\times 10^{4}1.5times104s−1^{-1}−1. Finally, the paper ends with the measurement of the velocity distribution of our lithium beam using a light induced fluorescence technique.\n
In our high-precision atom interferometer, the measured atomic phase shift is sensitive to rotations and accelerations of the apparatus, and also to phase fluctuations of the Raman lasers. In this paper we study two principal noise sources affecting the atomic phase shift, induced by optical phase noise and vibrations of the setup. Phase noise is reduced by carrying out a phase lock of the Raman lasers after the amplification stages. We also present a new scheme to reduce noise due to accelerations by using a feed-forward on the phase of the Raman beams. With these methods, it should be possible to reach the range of the atomic quantum projection noise limit, which is about 1 mrad rms for our experiment, i.e. 30 nrad s-1 Hz-1/2 for a rotation measurement.
Diffraction of atoms by lasers is a very important tool for matter wave optics. Although the process is well understood, the phase shifts induced by this diffraction process are not well known. In this paper, we make analytical calculations of these phase shifts in some simple cases and use these results to model the contrast interferometer recently built by Pritchard and co-workers. We thus show that the values of the diffraction phases are large and that they probably contribute to the phase noise observed in this experiment.