Eur. Phys. J. D (2012) 66: 75
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2012-20489-6

Regular Article

Weak gravity-like force detector by “Atom interferometers”

¹ Institute of Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, P.R. China
² Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, P.O. Box 8009, Beijing 100088, P.R. China
³ Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, 78712-1081 Texas, USA

^a e-mail: wdli@sxu.edu.cn

Received: 22 August 2011
Received in final form: 16 December 2011
Published online: 27 March 2012

Abstract

A weak gravity-like force detector is proposed using a novel scheme, through which the subtle modification of a weak gravity-like force on the interference pattern can be obtained. The weak gravity-like force creates two spatially imbalanced Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in a symmetric double-well and makes a shift of the interference fringes yielded after expansion of the BECs. The strength of the weak gravity-like force is revealed by investigating the Loschmidt echo and it can be read out by analysing the density profile of interference fringes. For the weak gravity-like force, we predict that the sensitivity can be δg ~ 10^-6.