Hannover 2016 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 21: Matter Wave Optics

Q 21.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 1, 2016, 16:00–16:15, a310

Circumventing Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in atom interferometry tests of the equivalence principle — •Albert Roura and the QUANTUS Team — Institut für Quantenphysik, Universität Ulm

Atom interferometry tests of universality of free fall based on the differential measurement of two different atomic species provide a useful complement [1] to those based on macroscopic masses. However, gravity gradients pose a serious challenge. In order to achieve very high sensitivities, the relative initial position and velocity for the two species need to be controlled with extremely high accuracy, which can be rather demanding in practice and whose verification may require rather long integration times. Furthermore, gravity gradients lead to a drastic loss of contrast. These difficulties can be mitigated by employing wave packets with narrower position and momentum widths, but this is ultimately limited by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We present a novel scheme that simultaneously overcomes the loss of contrast and the initial co-location problem [2]. In doing so, it circumvents the fundamental limitations due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and eases the experimental realization by relaxing the requirements on initial co-location by several orders of magnitude.

The QUANTUS project is supported by the German Space Agency (DLR) with funds provided by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) under grant number 50WM1556.

[1] D. Schlippert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 203002 (2014)

[2] A. Roura, arXiv:1509.08098