The effect of wavefront aberrations in atom interferometry

TL;DR

This paper investigates how wavefront aberrations affect atom interferometers, combining numerical and experimental methods to quantify and mitigate their impact, thereby improving measurement accuracy.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental verification of wavefront aberration-induced bias in atom interferometers and proposes a method to significantly reduce uncertainty.

Findings

Wavefront aberrations cause measurable bias in atomic gravimeters.

Experimental results agree with theoretical predictions.

The method reduces uncertainty by an order of magnitude.

Abstract

Wavefront aberrations are one of the largest uncertainty factors in present atom interferometers. We present a detailed numerical and experimental analysis of this effect based on measured aberrations from optical windows. By placing windows into the Raman beam path of our atomic gravimeter, we verify for the first time the induced bias in very good agreement with theory. Our method can be used to reduce the uncertainty in atomic gravimeters by one order of magnitude resulting in an error of less than $3\times 10^{-10}\,g$ and it is suitable in a wide variety of atom interferometers with thermal or ultra cold atoms. We discuss the limitations of our method, potential improvements and its role in future generation experiments.