Experimental study demonstrates increased momentum separation using excited-band Bloch oscillations in an optical lattice, indicating substantially improved precision for atom interferometers.
We propose and demonstrate a method to increase the momentum separation between the arms of an atom interferometer and thus its area and measurement precision, by using Bloch oscillations (BOs) in an excited band of a pulsed optical standing wave lattice. Using excited bands allows us to operate at particular "magic" depths, minimizing lattice-induced phase fluctuations that are unavoidable in ground-band BOs, while still maintaining high momentum transfer efficiency ($>99.4%$ per k, where k is the photon momentum). We apply this method to demonstrate interferometry with up to 40k momenta supplied by BOs. We discuss extensions of this technique to larger momentum transfer and adaptations towards metrological applications of atom interferometry such as a measurement of the fine-structure constant.
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McAlpine et al. (2020) studied this question.
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