Quantum gravimetry with intrinsic quantum time uncertainty

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum gravimetry under intrinsic time uncertainty, analyzing how profiling interrogation time affects gravity measurement precision across different quantum models.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for understanding gravity information extraction when interrogation time is uncertain, with explicit results for three benchmark quantum models.

Findings

Time profiling suppresses momentum-dependent gravity information.

Full state access restores measurement geometry in atom interferometers.

Conditions for minimizing information loss depend on initial state properties.

Abstract

We study quantum gravimetry when the interrogation time carries intrinsic uncertainty, motivated by a fundamental limit on temporal resolution associated with the energy--time uncertainty relation. For linearly gravity-coupled gravimeters, we obtain the effective gravity information by profiling the interrogation time from the two-parameter quantum Fisher information (QFI) matrix. In this class, the time-information block is quadratic in the gravitational parameter, and for quadratic background dynamics, the gravity--time cross term becomes affine in $g$. These properties yield a normalized expression for the fraction of standard single-parameter gravity QFI that remains once interrogation time is treated as a nuisance parameter, with an affine numerator and a Lorentzian denominator. We work out these results in three benchmark models: a freely falling Gaussian wavepacket, the Kasevich--Chu light-pulse atom interferometer, and an idealized closed-unitary optomechanical model. The Gaussian free-fall benchmark yields an exact closed-form expression for the effective gravity information and shows explicitly how nuisance-time profiling suppresses the momentum-spread-dependent part of the standard single-parameter gravity QFI. In the Kasevich--Chu interferometer, internal state population readout gives a rank-deficient measured two-parameter geometry unless independent timing information is supplied, whereas full access to the final motional and internal states restores a full-rank geometry with retention controlled by the competition between initial velocity spread and gravitationally accumulated motion. In atom-interferometric benchmarks, the framework yields explicit conditions for minimizing nuisance-time information loss, together with corresponding constraints on momentum spread, spatial localization, and long-interrogation-time operation.