Yannick Bidel

Detecting inertial effects with airborne matter-wave interferometry

Inertial sensors relying on atom interferometry offer a breakthrough advance in a variety of applications, such as inertial navigation, gravimetry or ground- and space-based tests of fundamental physics. These instruments require a quiet environment to reach their performance and using them outside the laboratory remains a challenge. Here we report the first operation of an airborne matter-wave accelerometer set up aboard a 0g plane and operating during the standard gravity (1g) and microgravity (0g) phases of the flight. At 1g, the sensor can detect inertial effects more than 300 times weaker than the typical acceleration fluctuations of the aircraft. We describe the improvement of the interferometer sensitivity in 0g, which reaches 2 x 10-4 ms-2 / √Hz with our current setup. We finally discuss the extension of our method to airborne and spaceborne tests of the Universality of free fall with matter waves.

Simultaneous dual-species matter-wave accelerometer

We report the realization of a matter-wave interferometer based on Raman transitions which simultaneously interrogates two different atomic species (

Parametric amplification of matter waves in periodically translated optical lattices.

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Local gravity measurement with the combination of atom interferometry and Bloch oscillations

Rb and

Characterization of a simultaneous dual-species atom interferometer for a quantum test of the weak equivalence principle

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Phase shift in an atom interferometer induced by the additional laser lines of a Raman laser generated by modulation

Rb). The simultaneous aspect of our experiment presents encouraging preliminary results for future dual-species atom interferometry projects and seems very promising by taking advantage of a differential acceleration measurement. Indeed the resolution of our differential accelerometer remains lower than

Multi-line fiber laser system for cesium and rubidium atom interferometry

3.9\times 10^{-8}g

Phase shift formulation for N-light-pulse atom interferometers: application to inertial sensing

even with vibration levels up to

New concepts of inertial measurements with multi-species atom interferometry

1\times10^{-3}g

Absolute gravimeter for terrain-aided navigation

thanks to common-mode vibration noise rejection . An atom based test of the Weak Equivalence Principle has also been carried out leading to a differential free fall measurement between both isotopes of