Detection of Applied and Ambient Forces with a Matterwave Magnetic-Gradiometer

Abstract

An atom interferometer using a Bose-Einstein condensate of ${}^{87}$Rb atoms is utilized for the measurement of magnetic field gradients. Composite optical pulses are used to construct a spatially symmetric Mach-Zehnder geometry. Using a biased interferometer we demonstrate the ability to measure small residual forces in our system at the position of the atoms. These are a residual magnetic field gradient of 15$\pm$2 mG/cm and and an inertial acceleration of 0.08$\pm$0.02 m/s${}^2$. Our method has important applications in the calibration of precision measurement devices and the reduction of systematic errors.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Atom Interferometers
• New determination of the fine structure constant and test of the quantum electrodynamics
• A New Method for Gravitational Wave Detection with Atomic Sensors
• Measurement of the Gravity-Field Curvature by Atom Interferometry
• Measurement of the ac Stark shift with a guided matter-wave interferometer
• Momentum-space engineering of gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Interferometric measurement of micro-g acceleration with levitated atoms