Atom interferometry with thousand-fold increase in dynamic range

Abstract

The periodicity inherent to any interferometric signal entails a fundamental trade-off between sensitivity and dynamic range of interferometry-based sensors. Here we develop a methodology for significantly extending the dynamic range of such sensors without compromising their sensitivity, scale-factor, and bandwidth. The scheme is based on operating two simultaneous, nearly-overlapping interferometers, with full-quadrature phase detection and with different but close scale factors. The two interferometers provide a joint period much larger than 2π in a moiré-like effect, while benefiting from close-to-maximal sensitivity and from suppression of common-mode noise. The methodology is highly suited to atom interferometers, which offer record sensitivities in measuring gravito-inertial forces but suffer from limited dynamic range. We experimentally demonstrate an atom interferometer with a dynamic-range enhancement of over an order of magnitude in a single shot and over three orders of magnitude within a few shots, for both static and dynamic signals. This approach can dramatically improve the operation of interferometric sensors in challenging, uncertain, or rapidly varying, conditions.

arXiv commentD.Y. and C.A. contributed equally. The text consists of 7 pages (+6 supplementary) and 5 figures (+5 supplementary)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Enhancing the sensitivity of atom-interferometric inertial sensors using robust control
• Closed-Loop Dual-Atom-Interferometer Inertial Sensor with Continuous Cold Atomic Beams
• Adaptive cold-atom magnetometry mitigating the trade-off between sensitivity and dynamic range
• Reinforcement Learning for Rotation Sensing with Ultracold Atoms in an Optical Lattice
• Enhancing Dynamic Range of Sub-Quantum-Limit Measurements via Quantum Deamplification
• Dual Open Atom Interferometry for Compact and Mobile Quantum Sensing