Measurements of Atomic Beam Velocities with Phase Choppers and Precision Measurements of Alkali Atomic Polarizabilities

Abstract

Atom interferometers, in which de Broglie waves are coherently split and recombined to make interference fringes, now serve as precision measurement tools for several quantities in physics. Examples include measurements of Newton's constant, the fine structure constant, van der Waals potentials, and atomic polarizabilities. To make next-generation measurements of static electric dipole atomic polarizabilities with an atom beam interferometer, I worked on new methods to precisely measure the velocity distribution for atom beams. I will explain how I developed and used phase choppers to measure lithium, sodium, potassium, and cesium atomic beam velocities with 0.07% accuracy. I also present new measurements of polarizability for these atoms. I classify systematic errors into two broad categories: (1) fractional errors that are similar for all different types of atoms in our experiments, and (2), errors that scale with de Broglie wavelength or inverse atomic momentum in our experiments. This distinction is important for estimating the uncertainty in our measurements of ratios of atomic polarizabilities, e.g., αCs / αNₐ = 2.488(12).