Three-Path Atom Interferometry with Large Momentum Separation

Benjamin Plotkin-Swing, Daniel Gochnauer, Katherine E. McAlpine, Eric S. Cooper, Alan O. Jamison, and Subhadeep Gupta

Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 133201 – Published 26 September 2018

Abstract

We demonstrate the scale up of a symmetric three-path contrast interferometer to large momentum separation. The observed phase stability at separation of 112 photon recoil momenta exceeds the performance of earlier free-space interferometers. In addition to the symmetric interferometer geometry and Bose-Einstein condensate source, the robust scalability of our approach relies on the suppression of undesired diffraction phases through a careful choice of atom optics parameters. The interferometer phase evolution is quadratic with number of recoils, reaching a rate as high as $7 \times 10^{7} rad / s$ . We discuss the applicability of our method towards a new measurement of the fine-structure constant and a test of QED.

Received 18 December 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.133201

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atom interferometry Atom optics Cold atoms & matter waves

Bose-Einstein condensates

Interferometry Precision measurements

Atomic, Molecular & OpticalGeneral Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Benjamin Plotkin-Swing^*, Daniel Gochnauer, Katherine E. McAlpine, Eric S. Cooper, Alan O. Jamison^†, and Subhadeep Gupta

Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA

^*benps@uw.edu
^†Present address: Department of Physics and MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.