Impact of the π-pulse shape on the contrast of thermal Atom Interferometers

Abstract

The key role of pi- and pi/2-pulses in atom interferometry has been widely recognized as their efficiency affect the overall performance of atomic interferometers. The inefficiencies are evident when using thermal cloud atoms as the field interaction does not compensate for the atom velocity. Temporal pulse shaping offers a solution to this issue by balancing the effect of the temporal shape of the mirror pulse in thermal cold atom interferometry by testing pulse shapes beyond the standard rectangle including Gaussian-like, Sinc-like, optimized Band-selective Uniform Response Pure-phase family, and optimized Gaussian Cascade family. We unveiled a correlation between the pi-pulse fidelity and the overall interferometer contrast function. We also found robust pulse sequences with respect to initial atom velocities that offer contrast as high as 0.7 compared to standard rectangle sequences with values of 0.2. The investigated pulse sequences offer an efficient way to improve the performance of atom interferometers, increasing the potential of thermal cold atom interferometry.