Atom Interferometry with Top-Hat Laser Beams
Abstract
The uniformity of the intensity and phase of laser beams is crucial to high-performance atom interferometers. Inhomogeneities in the laser intensity profile cause contrast reductions and systematic effects in interferometers operated with atom sources at micro-Kelvin temperatures, and detrimental diffraction phase shifts in interferometers using large momentum transfer beam splitters. We report on the implementation of a so-called top-hat laser beam in a long-interrogation-time cold-atom interferometer to overcome the issue of the inhomogeneous laser intensity encountered when using Gaussian laser beams. We characterize the intensity and relative phase profiles of the top-hat beam and demonstrate its gain in atom-optics efficiency over a Gaussian beam, in agreement with numerical simulations. We discuss the application of top-hat beams to improve the performance of different architectures of atom interferometers.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1808.03355,
title = {Atom Interferometry with Top-Hat Laser Beams},
author = {N. Mielec and M. Altorio and R. Sapam and D. Horville and D. Holleville and L. A. Sidorenkov and A. Landragin and R. Geiger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03355},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
4 pages plus references and Supplemental Material