Regular Article

SAGE: A proposal for a space atomic gravity explorer^⋆

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia and LENS, Università di Firenze, Firenze, Italy
² Department of Physics, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
³ Space Geodesy Centre, ASI, Matera, Italy
⁴ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
⁵ Laboratoire Photonique, Numerique et Nanosciences, Bordeaux, France
⁶ European Space Agency, Noordwijk, ZH, Netherlands
⁷ Dipartimento di Fisica, INFN, Università di Napoli “Federico II”, Napoli, Italy
⁸ Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China
⁹ Dipartimento di Fisica, INFN, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
¹⁰ Physics Department, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA
¹¹ Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Quantum Optics, Hanover Germany
¹² National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, Middlesex, UK
¹³ Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
¹⁴ Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale, Università di Roma, Roma, Italy
¹⁵ Department of Applied Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 113-8656 Tokyo, Japan
¹⁶ Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P.R. China
¹⁷ East China Normal University, Shanghai, P.R. China
¹⁸ University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
¹⁹ NIST, Boulder, CO, USA
²⁰ Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
²¹ Institut für Quantenphysik, Universität Ulm, Ulm, Germany
²² Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
²³ Institut für Experimentalphysik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
²⁴ Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
²⁵ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Genova, Genova, Italy
²⁶ Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Braunschweig, Germany
²⁷ Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
²⁸ Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
²⁹ DiSPeA, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy
³⁰ Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, 70013 Heraklion, Greece
³¹ School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 637371 Singapore, Singapore
³² LNE-SYRTE, Observatoire de Paris, CNRS, PSL, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
³³ JILA, NIST and University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
³⁴ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Ave., Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
³⁵ Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, CAS, Wuhan, P.R. China

^a e-mail: guglielmo.tino@unifi.it

Received: 19 May 2019
Received in final form: 24 September 2019
Published online: 15 November 2019

Abstract

The proposed mission “Space Atomic Gravity Explorer” (SAGE) has the scientific objective to investigate gravitational waves, dark matter, and other fundamental aspects of gravity as well as the connection between gravitational physics and quantum physics using new quantum sensors, namely, optical atomic clocks and atom interferometers based on ultracold strontium atoms.