Hannover 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 15: Matter-wave optics

Q 15.8: Vortrag

Montag, 18. März 2013, 18:30–18:45, F 142

Overcoming loss of contrast in atom interferometry due to gravity gradients — •Albert Roura, Wolfgang Zeller, Wolfgang P. Schleich, and the QUANTUS Team — Institut für Quantenphysik, Universität Ulm

Long-time atom interferometry in drop towers, sounding rockets and space missions is required for high-precision measurements of fundamental physical properties, including tests of the equivalence principle. Such measurements rely on the dependence of the phase shift between the two branches of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer as a function of the interrogation time and the corresponding oscillations in the integrated atom density at each exit port. For long times, however, gravity gradients cause the classical trajectories associated with the two branches not to close in phase space, which leads to a spatially dependent phase shift between the two overlapping wave-packets and a fringe-pattern density profile at the exit ports. This in turn implies a loss of contrast in the oscillations of the total number of atoms at each port and a reduction of the interferometer’s sensitivity. Here we present a strategy for overcoming such loss of contrast which is very simple to implement.

The QUANTUS project is supported by the German Space Agency (DLR) with funds provided by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) under grant number 50WM1136.