26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Multiparameter Estimation in Asymmetric Atom Interferometers

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Quantum Science and Technology (QST)

Description

Atom interferometers have emerged as a promising pathway for the development of compact, high-performance inertial sensors, and are now transitioning from controlled laboratory environments into robust, field-deployable devices. A critical challenge is the effect of imperfect interferometer closure due to environmental disturbances, such as rotations of the device, which reduce the visibility and contrast of the interferometer output. For narrow momentum-width sources, this effect can be mitigated by introducing a temporal asymmetry to a Mach-Zehnder interferometer sequence [1] where, in contrast to the conventional population difference measurements, information is extracted from a single image of a spatially varying interference pattern.

Here, we present a comprehensive theoretical framework for an asymmetric Mach-Zehnder atom interferometer, agnostic to specific input states. We investigate the limits to sensitivity of simultaneously measuring gravitational accelerations and platform rotations, as well as how these can be achieved through spatially-resolved readouts, using established techniques from quantum metrology.

[1] Y. Ben-Aïcha, Z. Mehdi, C. Freier, S. S. Szigeti, P. B. Wigley, L. O. Conlon, R. Husband, S. Legge, et al. “Dual Open Atom Interferometry for Compact and Mobile Quantum Sensing”. In: Physical Review Letters 133.26 (2024), p. 263403.