Enhancing supercurrent-based inertial sensing via interactions in atomtronic angular accelerometers

TL;DR

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for enhancing atomtronic angular accelerometers using supercurrents in ultracold atoms, demonstrating that weak interactions can surpass fundamental sensitivity limits.

Contribution

It introduces a method to improve inertial sensing by leveraging interactions in atomtronic systems, surpassing Fourier-limited sensitivity bounds.

Findings

Resonant supercurrents are induced at specific lattice driving frequencies.

Weak interactions enable sensitivity improvements beyond the Fourier limit.

Numerical simulations show at least two orders of magnitude enhancement in sensitivity.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate supercurrents of ultracold atoms in angularly ac-shaken ring lattices subjected to external rotation. Our results demonstrate how these supercurrents can be harnessed for the development of high-precision atomtronic angular accelerometers. Using both analytical and numerical approaches within the Bose-Hubbard model framework, we demonstrate that a significant net atomic current arises when the lattice driving frequency is tuned to an integer fraction of the Bloch frequency, while the current averages to nearly zero away from such a resonance. In the single-particle regime, the resonance width scales inversely with the averaging time, thereby setting a fundamental Fourier-limited bound on the measurement's sensitivity. Strikingly, our numerical simulations demonstrate that this Fourier limit - a fundamental barrier in the non-interacting system - can be surpassed by introducing weak interactions between atoms. In the interacting regime, the sensitivity surpasses the Fourier-limited scaling with the averaging time, achieving an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude over the single-particle scenario, and exceeding the performance of previously proposed ultracold-atom-based angular accelerometers. These findings pave the way for developing new atomic-current-based inertial sensors with interaction-enhanced sensitivity.