Full elimination of the gravity-gradient terms in atom interferometry

TL;DR

This paper presents a modified technique in atom interferometry that completely eliminates gravity-gradient effects, improving precision in gravity measurements and tests of fundamental physics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to fully cancel gravity-gradient terms in atom interferometry by adjusting effective wave vectors, enhancing measurement accuracy.

Findings

Error in gravity measurement reduced by three orders of magnitude.

Elimination of gravity-gradient effects independent of initial atom conditions.

Technique relaxes synchronization requirements in Einstein equivalence principle tests.

Abstract

The A. Roura technique was modified to eliminate all terms in the atom interferometer phase, which are linear in the gravity-gradient tensor. The full elimination occurs if all effective wave vectors are slightly changed. The full elimination technique would allow to relieve the synchronization requirements in the test of the Einstein equivalence principle. This technique also eliminates the error of the absolute gravity measurement associated with the gravity gradient terms. The error becomes three orders smaller and does not depend on the time delay between the Raman pulses. In addition, the new differential scheme is proposed to observe the gravity-gradient term independent on the atoms initial position and velocity.