T^4-Atom Interferometer Sensitive to Angular Acceleration

Abstract

Nowadays, matter-wave interferometry has become a powerful technique for measuring acceleration, gravity gradient, and constant rotation with enormous precision [1]. Here, we explore atom interferometer which is highly sensitive to unknown constant angular acceleration. By modeling rotation with fixed axis and constant angular acceleration with time-dependent angular velocity, we employ atom-interferometric scheme based on a sequence of five Raman laser pulses [2]. For a small enough initial angular velocity, we have found that the interferometer has a very high contrast. On the other hand, the leading term of the interferometer phase is linearly proportional to the angular acceleration and scales with the fourth order of the total interferometer time. In addition, we have investigated the feasibility of the proposed scheme for the typical ground- and space-based configurations, such as a rotating platform on earth and satellites.

[1] G.M. Tino and M.A. Kasevich (Eds.), Atom Interferometry (IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2014)

[2] K.-P. Marzlin and J. Audretsch, Phys. Rev. A 53, 312 (1996)