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Session B8: Quantum PNT 3

Guided Matter Wave Interferometry for Rotation Sensing
Zaire Sprowal, Bill Banas, Kristina Naumovska, Steve Hiller, David Skinner, John Sloan, Luke Zimmerman, Andrew Phillips, Rob Compton, Safran Federal Systems
Location: Ballroom E
Date/Time: Tuesday, Jun. 2, 5:05 p.m.

Safran Federal Systems is a leading provider of innovative products dedicated to the full spectrum of position, navigation, and timing (PNT) required for the national defense. Building on a deep legacy of precision atomic timekeeping, we report progress toward a guided matter wave interferometer for rotation sensing. Guided matter wave interferometers offer an attractive paradigm for quantum atomic inertial sensing due to the long interrogation times enabled by the deep trapping potentials, which support stable atomic interactions even for compact packages in the presence of high-g acceleration and vibration. Two key obstacles to achieving fieldable atom interferometers based on guided matter waves are addressed in our compact inertial sensor package. These challenges are:
1) The high laser power required to create off-resonant optical lattices that are deep enough to support the atoms against external inertial forces, including vibration, but also sufficiently far off resonance to limit decoherence due to single photon scattering. We propose to overcome laser power limitations by leveraging a three dimensional optical cavity to provide power enhancement to the optical trapping potential. An optical cavity is analogous to a capacitor for light, enabling a low cost, low power diode laser to build up an optical field that could otherwise only be sourced with a much larger laser outputting 10x to 100x the optical power of a laser diode.
2) The lack of full reciprocity in a conventional Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which means that field gradients, as well as imbalances in trapping potentials, lead to undesirable phase shifts. A lack of reciprocity also means that the interferometer phase shift is sensitive to both rotations and accelerations, a shortcoming that is not fully mitigated by operating counterpropagating interferometers. To address these shortcomings, we are developing a cold atom gyroscope in a novel, fully reciprocal Sagnac interferometer configuration.
At the cost of complexity, guided matter wave interferometry provides other advantages relative to traditional light pulse atom interferometry (LPAI). These advantages include a pathway for large momentum transfer (LMT) on the scale of many tens of photons, leading to interferometer pathways with aspect ratios much closer to unity. Furthermore, the atomic transitions underlying guided matter wave interferometers are internal state preserving, offering common mode rejection of electromagnetic field sensitivities. Finally, the optical potentials that guide the matter waves also support the atoms against gravity and platform dynamics, so that long interrogation times are possible, even in compact sensor volumes.
We acknowledge funding under the DARPA Robust Quantum Sensing (RoQS) program under DARPA Contract No. HR0011-25-9-0207. The views, opinions, and/or findings expressed are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of DARPA or the U.S. Government.

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