Simplified landscapes for optimization of shaken lattice interferometry

Abstract

Motivated by recent results using shaken optical lattices to perform atom interferometry, we explore the splitting of an atom cloud trapped in a phase-modulated (‘shaken’) optical lattice. Using a simple analytic model we are able to show that we can obtain the simplest case of ±2ℏ k _L splitting via single-frequency shaking. This is confirmed both via simulation and experiment. Furthermore, we are able to split with a relative phase θ between the two split arms of 0 or π depending on our shaking frequency. Addressing higher-order splitting, we determine that ±6ℏ k _L splitting is sufficient to be able to accelerate the atoms in counterpropagating lattices. Finally, we show that we can use a genetic algorithm to optimize ±4ℏ k _L and ±6ℏ k _L splitting to within ≈0.1% by restricting our optimization to the resonance frequencies corresponding to single- and two-photon transitions between Bloch bands. As a proof-of-principle, an experimental demonstration of simplified optimization of 4ℏ k _L splitting is presented.

Keywords

• atom interferometry
• optimization
• optical lattices
• quantum control