In atom interferometers based on two photon transitions, the delay induced by the difference of the laser beams paths makes the interferometer sensitive to the fluctuations of the frequency of the lasers. We first study, in the general case, how the laser frequency noise affects the performance of the interferometer measurement. Our calculations are compared with the measurements performed on our cold atom gravimeter based on stimulated Raman transitions. We finally extend this study to the case of cold atom gradiometers.
High sensitivity differential atom interferometers are promising for precision measurements in science frontiers in space, including gravity field mapping for Earth science studies and gravitational wave detection. We propose a new configuration of twin atom interferometers connected by a laser ranging interferometer (LRI-AI) to provide precise information of the displacements between the two AI reference mirrors and a means to phase-lock the two independent interferometer lasers over long distances, thereby further enhancing the feasibility of long baseline differential atom interferometers. …
We present a compact and transportable inertial sensor for precision sensing of rotations and accelerations. The sensor consists of a dual Mach-Zehnder-type atom interferometer operated with laser-cooled $^{87}$Rb. Raman processes are employed to coherently manipulate the matter waves. We describe and characterize the experimental apparatus. A method for passing from a compact geometry to an extended interferometer with three independent atom-light interaction zones is proposed and investigated. The extended geometry will enhance the sensitivity by more than two orders of magnitude which is ne…
Wavefront aberrations are identified as a major limitation in quantum sensors. They are today the main contribution in the uncertainty budget of best cold atom interferometers based on two-photon laser beam splitters, and constitute an important limit for their long-term stability, impeding these instruments from reaching their full potential. Moreover, they will also remain a major obstacle in future experiments based on large momentum beam splitters. In this article, we tackle this issue by using a deformable mirror to control actively the laser wavefronts in atom interferometry. In particul…
The use of Raman laser generated by modulation for light-pulse atom interferometer allows to have a laser system more compact and robust. However, the additional laser frequencies generated can perturb the atom interferometer. In this article, we present a precise calculation of the phase shift induced by the additional laser frequencies. The model is validated by comparison with experimental measurements on an atom gravimeter. The uncertainty of the phase shift determination limits the accuracy of our compact gravimeter at 8.10^-8 m/s^2. We show that it is possible to reduce considerably this…
We present a laser frequency stabilization system that uses a transfer interferometer to stabilize slave lasers to a reference laser. Our implementation uses off-the-shelf optical components along with microcontroller-based digital feedback, and offers a simple, flexible and robust way to stabilize multiple laser frequencies to better than 1 MHz.
We have developed a modified Michelson interferometer type Raman laser system to manipulate cold 87 Rb atoms to interfere. A frequency modulated continuous wave technique was introduced to determine the optical path difference, thus compensating it to zero to minimize the effects of common mode noise. The linewidth (full width at half maximum) of the beat signal at 6.834 GHz was measured to 1Hz limited by the resolution bandwidth of the spectral analyzer. The measured rms phase variance of the phase noise at 166 MHz was 0.015 rad2, mainly restricted by our poor performance radio frequency micr…
We demonstrate phase lock of two >1.6W Titanium:sapphire lasers with a phase noise of -138dBc/Hz at 1MHz from the carrier, using an intra-cavity electro-optic phase modulator. The residual phase variance is 2.5 10^(-8)rad^2 integrated from 1Hz to 10kHz. Instantaneous offset frequency steps of up to 4MHz are achieved within 200ns. Simultaneous atom interferometers can make full use of this ultra-low phase noise in differential measurements by suppressing common influences from vibration of optics.
Atom interferometry relies on the separation and recombination of atom wavepackets. When the two paths overlap perfectly at the end of the interferometer, the phase is insensitive to the atomic velocity distribution. Here, we show that, when the separation and recombination is performed using a Raman transition there is a displacement of the atomic wavepacket due to a phase shift during light pulses. Because of the variation of the laser intensity seen by the atoms, there is an imperfect cancellation of these displacements. The observation of a velocity-dependent phase shift on the interferome…
We outline new laser interferometer measurements to search for variation of the electromagnetic fine-structure constant $α$ and particle masses (including a non-zero photon mass). We propose a strontium optical lattice clock -- silicon single-crystal cavity interferometer as a novel small-scale platform for these new measurements. Multiple passages of a light beam inside an interferometer enhance the effects due to variation of the fundamental constants by the mean number of passages ($N_{\textrm{eff}} \sim 10^2$ for a large-scale gravitational-wave detector, such as LIGO, Virgo, GEO600 or TAM…
The uniformity of the intensity and phase of laser beams is crucial to high-performance atom interferometers. Inhomogeneities in the laser intensity profile cause contrast reductions and systematic effects in interferometers operated with atom sources at micro-Kelvin temperatures, and detrimental diffraction phase shifts in interferometers using large momentum transfer beam splitters. We report on the implementation of a so-called top-hat laser beam in a long-interrogation-time cold-atom interferometer to overcome the issue of the inhomogeneous laser intensity encountered when using Gaussian l…
We describe the realization and characterization of a compact, autonomous fiber laser system that produces the optical frequencies required for laser cooling, trapping, manipulation, and detection of $^{87}$Rb atoms - a typical atomic species for emerging quantum technologies. This device, a customized laser system from the Muquans company, is designed for use in the challenging operating environment of the Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB) in France, where a new large scale atom interferometer is being constructed underground - the MIGA antenna. The mobile bench comprises four frequen…
We demonstrate an inertia sensitive atom interferometer optically guided inside a 22-cm-long negative curvature hollow-core photonic crystal fiber with an interferometer time of 20 ms. The result prolongs the previous fiber guided atom interferometer time by three orders of magnitude. The improvement arises from the realization of in-fiber Λ-enhanced gray molasses and delta-kick cooling to cool atoms from 32 μK to below 1 μK in 4 ms. The in-fiber cooling overcomes the inevitable heating during the atom loading process and allows a shallow guiding optical potential to minimize decoherence. Our …
The extreme miniaturization of a cold-atom interferometer accelerometer requires the development of novel technologies and architectures for the interferometer subsystems. Here we describe several component technologies and a laser system architecture to enable a path to such miniaturization. We developed a custom, compact titanium vacuum package containing a microfabricated grating chip for a tetrahedral grating magneto-optical trap (GMOT) using a single cooling beam. In addition, we designed a multi-channel photonic-integrated-circuit-compatible laser system implemented with a single seed la…
We have demonstrated stabilization of a fiber-optic Mach-Zehnder interferometer, with a centimeter-scale path difference, to the transmission minimum for the carrier wave of a frequency-modulated laser beam. A time-averaged extinction of 32 dB, limited by the bandwidth of the feedback, was maintained over several hours. The interferometer was used to remove the carrier wave from a 780 nm laser beam that had been phase modulated at 2.7 GHz.
Monitoring and stabilizing the power ratio of laser pairs is significant to high-precision atom interferometers, especially as the compact electro-optic modulated all-fiber laser system prevails. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel method to in-situ probe the relative power of laser pairs and to stabilize the power ratio of two Raman lasers using a high-dispersion virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) etalon. Sub-microsecond resolution on probing laser power transformation during atom interferometer sequence is achieved and the power ratio of two Raman lasers (PRTR) is tightly locked with hi…
Cold-atom interferometers commonly face systematic effects originating from the coupling between the trajectory of the atomic wave packet and the wave front of the laser beams driving the interferometer. Detrimental for the accuracy and the stability of such inertial sensors, these systematics are particularly enhanced in architectures based on spatially separated laser beams. Here we analyze the effect of a coupling between the relative alignment of two separated laser beams and the trajectory of the atomic wave packet in a four-light-pulse cold-atom gyroscope operated in fountain configurati…
Long ground-Rydberg coherence lifetime is interesting for implementing high-fidelity quantum logic gates, many-body physics, and other quantum information protocols. However, the potential well formed by a conventional far-off-resonance red-detuned optical-dipole trap that is attractive for ground-state cold atoms is usually repulsive for Rydberg atoms, which will result in the rapid loss of atoms and low repetition rate of the experimental sequence. Moreover, the coherence time will be sharply shortened due to the residual thermal motion of cold atoms. These issues can be addressed by a one-d…
High harmonic spectroscopy can access structural and dynamical information on molecular systems encoded in amplitude and phase of high harmonic generation (HHG) signals4. However, measurement of the harmonic phase is a daunting task. Here we present a precise measurement of HHG phase difference between two isotopes of molecular hydrogen using the advanced extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) Gouy phase interferometer. The measured phase difference is about 200 mrad, corresponding to 3 attoseconds (1 as = 10^-18 s) time delay which is nearly independent of harmonic order. The measurements agree very well …
