Doppler Compensated Cavity For Atom Interferometry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Doppler compensated optical cavity design for atom interferometry, enabling larger mode diameters and improved performance by tracking laser frequency shifts, thus overcoming previous cavity limitations.

Contribution

The authors propose and demonstrate a novel cavity scheme with a tunable birefringence element that compensates Doppler shifts, allowing larger mode diameters and enhanced atom interferometry capabilities.

Findings

Achieved a 5.04 mm beam waist with cavity enhancement.

Demonstrated Doppler compensation with a Pockels cell in a linear cavity.

Enabled suppression of higher order spatial modes.

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a scheme to enable Doppler compensation within optical cavities for atom interferometry at significantly increased mode diameters. This has the potential to overcome the primary limitations in cavity enhancement for atom interferometry, circumventing the cavity linewidth limit and enabling mode filtering, power enhancement, and a large beam diameter simultaneously. This approach combines a magnified linear cavity with an intracavity Pockels cell. The Pockels cell introduces a voltage tunable birefringence allowing the cavity mode frequencies to track the Raman lasers as they scan to compensate for gravitationally induced Doppler shifts, removing the dominant limitation of current cavity enhanced systems. A cavity is built to this geometry and shown to simultaneously realize the capability required for Doppler compensation, with a 5.04~mm $1/e^{2}$ diameter beam waist and an enhancement factor of $>$5x at a finesse of 35. Furthermore, this has a tunable Gouy phase, allowing the suppression of higher order spatial modes and the avoidance of regions of instability. This approach can therefore enable enhanced contrast and longer atom interferometry times while also enabling the key features of cavity enhanced atom interferometry, power enhancement and the reduction of aberrations. This is relevant to future reductions in the optical power requirement of quantum technology, or in providing enhanced performance for atom interferometers targeting fundamental science.