Abstract
We have observed Bloch oscillations of a 4He∗ Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice at 1557.3 nm. Due to its low mass, metastable helium was efficiently accelerated orders of magnitude faster than demonstrated with other atoms. In a horizontal lattice, we could transfer a total of 800ℏk of momentum by shuttling the atomic cloud back and forth 50 times between the 4 k and -4 k momentum states with an efficiency of over 99% per Bloch cycle. In a vertical lattice, gravity-induced Bloch oscillations were demonstrated, from which the local gravitational acceleration was derived with a statistical uncertainty of 4×10-5. A clear advantage of He∗ over other atoms is that it can be detected with a microchannel plate detector with near unity efficiency, and this enabled observation of Bloch oscillations up to 12 s even though the number of atoms decreased by three orders of magnitude. These results establish He∗ as a promising candidate for future precision measurements with atom interferometry.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 061302 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-6 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Physical Review A |
| Volume | 102 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 21 Dec 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2020 |
Funding
The authors would like to thank Prof. T. van Leeuwen of the Eindhoven University of Technology and Dr. M. D. Hoogerland from the University of Auckland for technical and material support. We are grateful for many stimulating discussions with Y. van der Werf and Dr. R. Jannin. We thank Prof. Wim Ubachs for support. This work was financially supported by the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM).
