Abstract
Cold atom quantum sensors based on atom interferometry are among the most accurate instruments used in fundamental physics, metrology, and foreseen for autonomous inertial navigation. However, they typically have optically complex, cumbersome, and low-bandwidth atom detection systems, limiting their practical applications. Here, we demonstrate an enabling technology for high-bandwidth, compact, and nondestructive detection of cold atoms, using microwave radiation. We measure the reflected microwave signal to coherently and distinctly detect the population of single quantum states with a bandwidth close to 30 kHz and a design destructivity that we set to 0.04%. We use a horn antenna and free-falling molasses cooled atoms in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this technique in conventional cold atom interferometers. This technology, combined with coplanar waveguides used as microwave sources, provides a basic design building block for detection in future atom chip-based compact quantum inertial sensors.
Highlights
Cold atom quantum sensors based on atom interferometry are among the most accurate instruments used in fundamental physics, metrology, and foreseen for autonomous inertial navigation
One can compute the occupation probability of the relevant atomic states, which directly depends on the effect of the observable of interest sensed by the instrument. In atom interferometers such as state-of-theart gyrometers[1] and gravimeters/accelerometers[2,3], the phase of the interference fringes encodes the inertial forces acting upon the device. This phase is extracted from the above-mentioned occupation probability and the most widely used cold atom detection techniques to do it are destructive
We have demonstrated in this work a state-sensitive detection technique based on the reflected power of microwave radiation in the presence of cold atoms
Summary
Cold atom quantum sensors based on atom interferometry are among the most accurate instruments used in fundamental physics, metrology, and foreseen for autonomous inertial navigation. We use a horn antenna and free-falling molasses cooled atoms in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this technique in conventional cold atom interferometers This technology, combined with coplanar waveguides used as microwave sources, provides a basic design building block for detection in future atom chip-based compact quantum inertial sensors. The above-mentioned nondestructive methods require complex optical systems and experimental setups, including in some cases optical cavities, to efficiently detect the light after interaction with the atoms[17–19] These are important limitations for the realization of practical compact cold atom quantum sensors having, for example, an atom chip as the main component of their physics package[20]. To mitigate these limitations one possible solution is to detect the atoms nondestructively using microwave instead of light
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