Observation and Control of Interactions in a Yb BEC Lattice Trapped Atom Interferometer

Trapped atom interferometry is a promising platform for precision measurement and quantum sensing [1,2]. Unlike traditional free-fall light pulse atom interferometers whose interrogation times are limited to the size of the vacuum chamber, limited to the second-scale, optical lattice-trapped atom interferometers have recently been shown to exhibit more than a minute of coherence [3]. The coherence time of such interferometers are ultimately limited by differential Stark shifts between the interferometer arms, which was found in [3] to scale with the velocity width of the ensemble, motivating the use of ever colder atom sources.

Here we extend Yb atom interferometry [4] into the lattice-trapped interferometer geometry, with an atom source that can be cooled all the way to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) using evaporative cooling. We observe and demonstrate control of interaction effects in this lattice-trapped atom interferometer with 174Yb BECs, delineating a boundary for metrology and sensing based on single-particle physics. This regime is investigated by controllably varying the density of the BEC through the number of atoms entering the interferometric sequence as well as the free expansion time of the condensate prior to lattice trapping. Control of such atomic interactions opens the door to the gainful use of many-body states for enhanced atom interferometric quantum sensing [5].

[1] Panda et al., 2024. Nature 631, 515-520.

[2] Zhang et al., 2016. PRA 94, 043608.

[3] Panda et al., 2024. Nature Physics 20, 1234-1239.

[4] Rahman et al., 2024. PRR 6, L022012.

[5] Corgier et al., 2021. PRL 127, 183401.