Generalized gravity-gradient mitigation scheme

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized mitigation scheme for gravity-gradient effects in atom interferometry, addressing complex inhomogeneous gravitational fields and arbitrary geometries to improve measurement precision.

Contribution

It provides a new mitigation formula applicable to anharmonic potentials and complex geometries, including local gravitational variations and Coriolis effects.

Findings

Mitigation formula effectively compensates for anharmonic gravitational perturbations.

Applicable to arbitrary interferometer geometries and branch separations.

Enables correction of Coriolis effects in rotating frames.

Abstract

A major challenge in high-precision light-pulse atom interferometric experiments such as in tests of the weak equivalence principle is the uncontrollable dependency of the phase on initial velocity and position of the atoms in the presence of inhomogeneous gravitational fields. To overcome this limitation, mitigation strategies have been proposed, however, valid only for harmonic potentials or only for small branch separations in more general situations. Here we provide a mitigation formula for anharmonic perturbation potentials including local gravitational effects that vary on length scales much smaller than the spatial extent probed by the atoms and originate, e.g., from buildings that surround the experiment. Furthermore, our results are applicable to general interferometer geometries with arbitrary branch separation and allow for compensation of Coriolis effects in rotating reference frames.