Mach-Zehnder interferometry with interacting trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using trapped Bose-Einstein condensates, demonstrating its stability against interactions and potential to surpass shot noise limits with advanced phase estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a robust interferometry scheme with interacting condensates that can achieve Heisenberg-limited sensitivity using Bayesian or Maximum-Likelihood estimation.

Findings

Interferometer stability against nonlinearity from interactions

Potential to surpass shot noise limit with squeezed states

Robustness against condensate oscillations and atom counting errors

Abstract

We theoretically analyze a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with trapped condensates, and find that it is surprisingly stable against the nonlinearity induced by inter-particle interactions. The phase sensitivity, which we study for number squeezed input states, can overcome the shot noise limit and be increased up to the Heisenberg limit provided that a Bayesian or Maximum-Likelihood phase estimation strategy is used. We finally demonstrate robustness of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer in presence of interactions against condensate oscillations and a realistic atom counting error.