Long-lived Bloch oscillations with bosonic Sr atoms and application to gravity measurement at micrometer scale

Abstract

We report on the observation of Bloch oscillations on the unprecedented time scale of severalseconds. The experiment is carried out with ultra-cold bosonic strontium-88 loaded into a vertical optical standing wave. The negligible atom-atom elastic cross section and the absence of spin makes ${}^{88}$Sr an almost ideal Bose gas insensitive to typical mechanisms of decoherence due to thermalization and to external stray fields. The small size enables precision measurements of forces at micrometer scale. This is a challenge in physics for studies of surfaces, Casimir effects, and searches for deviations from Newtonian gravity predicted by theories beyond the standard model.

References in corpus (2)

• New asymptotic behaviour of the surface-atom force out of thermal equilibrium
• Cooling and trapping of ultra-cold strontium isotopic mixtures

Cited by in corpus (26)

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• Combination of Bloch oscillations with a Ramsey-Bordé interferometer : new determination of the fine structure constant
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• Coherent Delocalization of Atomic Wave Packets in Driven Lattice Potentials
• Two-photon photoassociative spectroscopy of ultracold 88-Sr
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• Is it possible to detect gravitational waves with atom interferometers?
• Measuring Electric Fields From Surface Contaminants with Neutral Atoms
• Fourier-transform spectroscopy of Sr2 and revised ground state potential
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• Laser cooling and trapping of atomic strontium for ultracold atom physics, high-precision spectroscopy and quantum sensors
• Atom interferometry based on light pulses : application to the high precision measurement of the ratio h/m and the determination of the fine structure constant
• Damped Bloch Oscillations of Bose-Einstein Condensates in Disordered Potential Gradients
• On the feasibility of studying vortex noise in 2D superconductors with cold atoms
• Perspectives for coherent optical formation of strontium molecules in their electronic ground state
• Precise determination of h/m_Rb using Bloch oscillations and atomic interferometry: a mean to deduce the fine structure constant
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• Proposal for new experimental schemes to realize the Avogadro constant
• Concept of momentum-less bodies and a suggestion for its experimental verification using ultra-cold atoms
• Engineering the quantum transport of atomic wavefunctions over macroscopic distances