Related papers: Measuring gravity by holding atoms

Atom interferometers are powerful tools for both measurements in fundamental physics and inertial sensing applications. Their performance, however, has been limited by the available interrogation time of freely falling atoms in a…

We have realized an atom interferometer that probes gravitational potentials by holding, rather than dropping, atoms. Up to one minute of coherence times are realized by suspending the spatially separated atomic wave packets in an optical…

Atom interferometers have been developed in the last three decades as new powerful tools to investigate gravity. They were used for measuring the gravity acceleration, the gravity gradient, and the gravity-field curvature, for the…

Gravity is the weakest fundamental interaction and the only one that has not been measured at the particle level. Traditional experimental methods, from astronomical observations to torsion balances, use macroscopic masses to both source…

We realize an interferometer with an atomic Fermi gas trapped in an optical lattice under the influence of gravity. The single-particle interference between the eigenstates of the lattice results in macroscopic Bloch oscillations of the…

Atomic accelerometers and gravimeters are usually based on freely-falling atoms in atomic fountains, which not only limits their size, but also their robustness to environmental factors such as tilts, magnetic fields or vibrations. Such…

The accelerated expansion of the universe motivates a wide class of scalar field theories that modify gravity on large scales. In regions where the weak field limit of General Relativity has been confirmed by experiment, such theories need…

We propose a new scheme for an improved determination of the Newtonian gravitational constant G and evaluate it by numerical simulations. Cold atoms in free fall are probed by atom interferometry measurements to characterize the…

Atom interferometers allow the measurement of the acceleration of freely falling atoms with respect to an experimental platform at rest on Earth's surface. Such experiments have been used to test the universality of free fall by comparing…

Atom interferometers measure quantum interference patterns in the wave functions of cold atoms that follow superpositions of different space-time trajectories. These can be sensitive to phase shifts induced by fundamental physics processes…

In this work, quantum gravity effects, which can potentially be measured in magnetometers through the Larmor frequency of atoms in an external magnetic field, are estimated. It is shown that the thermal motion of atoms can, in principle,…

This paper describes the concept and the beginning of an experimental investigation of whether it is possible to directly detect dark energy density on earth using atom interferometry. The concept is to null out the gravitational force…

We focus on the fact that light-pulse atom interferometers measure the atoms' acceleration with only three data points per drop. As a result, the measured effect of the gravity gradient is systematically larger than the true one, an error…

Light-pulse atom interferometers constitute powerful quantum sensors for inertial forces. They are based on delocalised spatial superpositions and the combination with internal transitions directly links them to atomic clocks. Since…

The unprecedented precision of atom interferometry will soon lead to laboratory tests of general relativity to levels that will rival or exceed those reached by astrophysical observations. We propose such an experiment that will initially…

One of the major limitations of atomic gravimeters is represented by the vibration noise of the measurement platform, which cannot be distinguished from the relevant acceleration signal. We demonstrate a new method to perform an atom…

Atomic interferometers measure forces and acceleration with exceptional precision. The conventional approach to atomic interferometry is to launch an atomic cloud into a ballistic trajectory and perform the wave-packet splitting in momentum…

In quantum metrology and quantum simulation, a coherent non-classical state must be manipulated before unwanted interactions with the environment lead to decoherence. In atom interferometry, the non-classical state is a spatial…

Measuring the effect of gravity on antimatter is a longstanding problem in physics that has significant implications for our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. Here, we present a technique to measure the gravitational…

Atom interferometry is now reaching sufficient precision to motivate laboratory tests of general relativity. We begin by explaining the non-relativistic calculation of the phase shift in an atom interferometer and deriving its range of…