Atom interferometry with thousand-fold increase in dynamic range

Atom interferometry offers extremely high sensitivity in measuring acceleration, gravitational fields and their gradients, and rotations. It is a promising technology for applications such as gravity surveys and navigation systems, which require operation in mobile and potentially unstable environments, measuring rapidly-changing, unknown signals. These challenges motivate development of new techniques to improve the sensitivity [PRA 100, 023617 (2019)], scale factor stability [PRA 102, 013326 (2020)] and dynamic range [PRApplied 13, 054053 (2020)] of atom interferometers under such conditions.

In this talk we present a new methodology for significantly extending the dynamic range of atom interferometry [Sci. Adv. 6, eabd0650 (2020)], based on two simultaneous and nearly-identical interferometers, providing a moiré-like period much larger than 2π and benefiting from near-maximal sensitivity and suppression of common-mode noise. We demonstrate a dynamic-range enhancement of over an order of magnitude in a single shot and over three orders of magnitude within a few shots, without compromising the measurement sensitivity and stability. We achieve this for both static and dynamic signals, introducing a novel implementation of particle filtering to atom interferometry.