A high-flux cold-atom source for area-enclosing atom interferometry

Rotation-sensing is one of the most important applications of atom-interferometey due to its potential for precession measurements of various physical effects and practical applications in navigation and geophysics. While atom-gyroscopes with short-term sensitivities comparable to the best light gyroscope already exist, one of the major drawbacks is their large physical size. Thus it is desirable to reduce the apparatus size of the interferometer while maintaining precession and accuracy of the rotation measurements. In this dissertation coherent control of atoms in multiple dimensions is studied via Talbot-Lau atom-interferometey and different schemes of compact area-enclosing atom-interferometers are discussed. The cold-atom sample used in the interferometer experiment was loaded from an atomic beam generated by a 2D+MOT vapor cell source. The measured atom-flux of 1 · 10 11 atoms/s is the highest flux-number that has so far been reported in compact vapor cell sources and comprises an improvement of half an order of magnitude with respect to the best previous result. A pulsed, area-enclosing atomic-beam Talbot-Lau interferometer was demonstrated by using a sequence of standing wave pulses to split and recombine the atoms transversely while the atomic beam propagated in longitudinal direction. The area enclosed by the interferometer arms was limited to 5 · 10 -5 mm 2 by the available standing-wave laser power. An area-enclosing interferometer was also realized by adding a second standing wave in a direction perpendicular to the first to allow for coherent manipulation of atoms in a plane rather than along the line defined by the direction of a single standing wave. This is the first demonstration of coherent control of atoms in more that one dimension. The area enclosed by the 2-D Talbot-Lau interferometer is precisely defined by the transfer of recoil momentum in both dimensions while ordinary area-enclosing atom interferometers employ beam-splitting schemes in one dimension and enclose area through movement of the atoms along a direction perpendicular to the beam-split direction. A theoretical scheme for a guided atom-interferometer on a chip is presented as a third method to enclose area. The proposed scheme has potential to enclose larger areas than the best state of the art gyroscope while reducing the overall size of the system by one order of magnitude.