Impact of the π-pulse shape on the contrast of thermal Atom Interferometers

Abstract

The key role of π- and π/2- pulses in atom interferometry has been widely recognized as their
efficiency affect the overall performance of atomic interferometers. The inefficiencies are evident
when using thermal cloud atoms as the field interaction does not compensate for the atom velocity.
Temporal pulse shaping offers a solution to this issue by balancing the effect of the temporal shape
of the mirror pulse in thermal cold atom interferometry by testing pulse shapes beyond the standard
rectangle including Gaussian-like, Sinc-like, optimized Band-selective Uniform Response Pure-phase
family, and optimized Gaussian Cascade family. We unveiled a correlation between the π pulse
fidelity and the overall interferometer contrast function. We also found robust pulse sequences with
respect to initial atom velocities that offer contrast as high as 0.7 compared to standard rectangle
sequences with values of 0.2. The investigated pulse sequences offer an efficient way to improve the
performance of atom interferometers, increasing the potential of thermal cold atom interferometry.