Rabi interferometry and sensitive measurement of the Casimir-Polder force with ultracold gases

Jan Chwedenczuk (1) , Luca Pezzé (2) , Francesco Piazza (1) , Augusto Smerzi (1)

1 BEC-CNR-INFM and Dipartimento di Fisica
2 laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Optique atomique

We show that Rabi oscillations of a degenerate fermionic or bosonic gas trapped in a double-well potential can be exploited for the interferometric measurement of external forces at micrometer length scales. The Rabi interferometer is less sensitive but easier to implement than the Mach-Zehnder, since it does not require dynamical beam-splitting or recombination processes. As an application we propose a measurement of the Casimir-Polder force acting between the atoms and a dielectric surface. We find that even if the interferometer is fed with a coherent state of relatively small number of atoms, and in the presence of realistic experimental noise, the force might be measured with a sensitivity sufficient to discriminate between thermal and zero-temperature regimes of the Casimir-Polder potential. Higher sensitivities can be reached with bosonic spin squeezed states

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Jan Chwedenczuk, Luca Pezzé, Francesco Piazza, Augusto Smerzi. Rabi interferometry and sensitive measurement of the Casimir-Polder force with ultracold gases. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2010, 82 (3), pp.032104. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.82.032104⟩. ⟨hal-00746827⟩