Combination of Bloch oscillations with a Ramsey-Bordé interferometer : new determination of the fine structure constant

Abstract

We report a new experimental scheme which combines atom interferometry with Bloch oscillations to provide a new measurement of the ratio $h/m_{\mathrm{Rb}}$. By using Bloch oscillations, we impart to the atoms up to 1600 recoil momenta and thus we improve the accuracy on the recoil velocity measurement. The deduced value of $h/m_{\mathrm{Rb}}$ leads to a new determination of the fine structure constant ${\alpha }^{-1}=137.03599945(62)$ with a relative uncertainty of $4.6\times 10^{-9}$. The comparison of this result with the value deduced from the measurement of the electron anomaly provides the most stringent test of QED.

References in corpus (3)

• Atom Interferometry with up to 24-Photon-Momentum-Transfer Beam Splitters
• Revised value of the eighth-order electron g-2
• Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms: a tool for a metrological determination of $h/m_{Rb}$

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Decoherence and Collisional Frequency Shifts of Trapped Bosons and Fermions
• Noise-Immune Conjugate Large-Area Atom Interferometers