iSense: A Portable Ultracold-Atom-Based Gravimeter

A cold atom pyramidal gravimeter with a single laser beam

Underground operation at best sensitivity of the mobile LNE-SYRTE Cold Atom Gravimeter

Low noise underground environments offer conditions allowing to assess ultimate performance of high sensitivity sensors such as accelerometers, gyrometers, seismometers... Such facilities are for instance ideal for observing the tiny signals of interest for geophysical studies. Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB) in which we have installed our cold atom gravimeter, provides such an enviro...

Influence of lasers propagation delay on the sensitivity of atom interferometers

In atom interferometers based on two photon transitions, the delay induced by the difference of the laser beams paths makes the interferometer sensitive to the fluctuations of the frequency of the lasers. We first study, in the general case, how the laser frequency noise affects the performance of the interferometer measurement. Our calculations are compared with the measurements performed on o...

Double diffraction in an atomic gravimeter

We demonstrate the realization of a new scheme for cold atom gravimetry based on the use of double diffraction beamsplitters recently demonstrated in [1], where the use of two retro-reflected Raman beams allows symmetric diffraction in ±h̄keff momenta. Though in principle restricted to the case of zero Doppler shift, for which the two pairs of Raman beams are simultaneously resonant, we demonstr...

Precision measurement of gravity with cold atoms in an optical lattice and comparison with a classical gravimeter.

We report on a precision measurement of gravitational acceleration using ultracold strontium atoms confined in an amplitude-modulated vertical optical lattice. An uncertainty Δg/g ≈ 10(-7) is reached by measuring at the 5th harmonic of the Bloch frequency. The value obtained with this microscopic quantum system is consistent with the one measured with a classical gravimeter. Using lattice modul...