A new photon recoil experiment: towards a determination of the fine structure constant

Abstract

We report on progress towards a measurement of the fine structure constant to an accuracy of $5\times 10^{-10}$ or better by measuring the ratio of the Planck constant to the mass of the cesium atom. Compared to similar experiments, ours is improved in three significant ways: (i) simultaneous conjugate interferometers, (ii) multi-photon Bragg diffraction between same internal states, and (iii) an about 1000 fold reduction of laser phase noise to -138 dBc/Hz. Combining that with a new method to simultaneously stabilize the phases of four frequencies, we achieve 0.2 mrad effective phase noise at the location of the atoms. In addition, we use active stabilization to suppress systematic effects due to beam misalignment.

arXiv comment12 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (7)

• CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants: 2010
• Measurement of the Negative Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment to 0.7 ppm
• A new determination of the fine structure constant based on Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms in a vertical optical lattic
• Photon recoil momentum in dispersive media
• Phase-Locked, Low-Noise, Frequency Agile Titanium: Sapphire Lasers for Simultaneous Atom Interferometers
• Active sub-Rayleigh alignment of parallel or antiparallel laser beams
• Fast high--voltage amplifiers for driving electro-optic modulators

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