An atomic Fabry-Perot interferometer-based acceleration sensor for microgravity environments

TL;DR

This paper explores an atomic Fabry-Perot interferometer as a space-based acceleration sensor, analyzing its sensitivity and potential advantages over traditional interferometers for microgravity environments.

Contribution

It provides an analytic model of the atomic FPI's transmission under acceleration and compares its sensitivity to a Mach-Zender interferometer, highlighting conditions for optimal performance.

Findings

Atomic FPI can outperform MZ interferometers at small device lengths with ideal sources.

Finite atomic momentum width reduces the FPI's sensitivity advantage.

Potential for atomic FPI as a future high-sensitivity acceleration sensor with narrow atomic sources.

Abstract

We investigate the use of an atomic Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) with a pulsed non-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) source as a space-based acceleration sensor. We derive an analytic approximation for the device's transmission under a uniform acceleration, which we use to compute the device's attainable acceleration sensitivity using the classical Fisher information. In the ideal case of a high-finesse FPI and an infinitely narrow momentum width atomic source, we find that when the total length of the device is constrained to small values, the atomic FPI can achieve greater acceleration sensitivity than a Mach-Zender (MZ) interferometer of equivalent total device length. Under the more realistic case of a finite momentum width atomic source, We identify the ideal cavity length that gives the best sensitivity. Although the MZ interferometer now offers enhanced sensitivity within currently-achievable experimental parameter regimes, our analysis demonstrates that the atomic FPI holds potential as a promising alternative in the future, provided that narrow momentum width atomic sources can be engineered.