Regular Article

Measuring the gravitational acceleration with matter-wave velocimetry^⋆

¹ INFN Sezione di Firenze, Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia & LENS, Università di Firenze, Via Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino (FI), Italy
² European Space Agency, Keplerlaan 1, 2200 AG Noordwijk, The Netherlands

^b e-mail: rosi@fi.infn.it

Received: 6 October 2018
Received in final form: 4 February 2019
Published online: 14 May 2019

Abstract

One of the major limitations of atomic gravimeters is represented by the vibration noise of the measurement platform, which cannot be distinguished from the relevant acceleration signal. In this paper we perform atom interferometry measurements of the gravitational acceleration with high resolution without any need for a vibration isolation system or post-corrections based on seismometer data monitoring the residual accelerations at the sensor head. Using two different schemes, a Ramsey and a Ramsey–Bordé interferometer, we measure the velocity variation of freely falling cold atom samples, thus determining the gravitational acceleration experienced by them. Our instrument has a fractional stability of 2.7 × 10⁻⁶ at 1 s of integration time, more than one order of magnitude better than a standard Mach–Zehnder interferometer when operated without any vibration isolation or applied post-correction.