The effect of wavefront aberrations in atom interferometry

Abstract

Wavefront aberrations are one of the largest uncertainty factors in present atom interferometers. We present a detailed numerical and experimental analysis of this effect based on measured aberrations from optical windows. By placing windows into the Raman beam path of our atomic gravimeter, we verify for the first time the induced bias in very good agreement with theory. Our method can be used to reduce the uncertainty in atomic gravimeters by one order of magnitude resulting in an error of less than $3\times 10^{-10}g$ and it is suitable in a wide variety of atom interferometers with thermal or ultra cold atoms. We discuss the limitations of our method, potential improvements and its role in future generation experiments.

Applied Physics B, 2015

References in corpus (5)

• Precision Measurement of the Newtonian Gravitational Constant Using Cold Atoms
• Quantum Test of the Universality of Free Fall
• Stability comparison of two absolute gravimeters: optical versus atomic interferometers
• An Atomic Gravitational Wave Interferometric Sensor in Low Earth Orbit (AGIS-LEO)
• Effective velocity distribution in an atom gravimeter: effect of the convolution with the response of the detection

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Spin-polarizing interferometric beam splitter for free electrons
• Phase shift in atom interferometers: corrections for non-quadratic potentials and finite-duration laser pulses