Probing Gravity for one Minute with an Optical-Lattice Atom Interferometer

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel atom interferometer that uses optical lattices to hold atoms for up to one minute, significantly reducing noise and enabling high-precision gravitational measurements and tests of fundamental physics.

Contribution

The work introduces a trapped atom interferometer with extended coherence times, achieving unprecedented stability and precision in gravitational sensing.

Findings

Achieved up to one minute of coherence time in atom interferometry.

Suppressed vibration-induced phase noise by four to five orders of magnitude.

Enabled high-precision measurements of gravitational fields and quantum gravity tests.

Abstract

We have realized an atom interferometer that probes gravitational potentials by holding, rather than dropping, atoms. Up to one minute of coherence times are realized by suspending the spatially separated atomic wave packets in an optical lattice that is mode-filtered by an optical cavity. This trapped configuration suppresses phase variance due to vibrations by four to five orders of magnitude, overcoming the dominant noise source in atom-interferometric gravimeters. Recent progress in characterizing and reducing interferometer decoherence led to major increases in coherence and precision, paving the way to measurements of dark-energy candidates and probes of the quantum nature of gravity through measuring the gravity of source masses with record precision and spatial resolution.