No Cover Image

Journal article 1077 views 150 downloads

Free Nano-Object Ramsey Interferometry for Large Quantum Superpositions

C. Wan, M. Scala, G. W. Morley, ATM. A. Rahman, H. Ulbricht, James Bateman Orcid Logo, P. F. Barker, S. Bose, M. S. Kim

Physical Review Letters, Volume: 117, Issue: 14

Swansea University Author: James Bateman Orcid Logo

  • PhysRevLett.117.143003.pdf

    PDF | Version of Record

    Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

    Download (513.76KB)

Abstract

We propose an interferometric scheme based on an untrapped nano-object subjected to gravity. The motion of the center of mass (c.m.) of the free object is coupled to its internal spin system magnetically, and a free flight scheme is developed based on coherent spin control. The wavepacket of the tes...

Full description

Published in: Physical Review Letters
ISSN: 0031-9007 1079-7114
Published: American Physical Society (APS) 2016
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa30573
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: We propose an interferometric scheme based on an untrapped nano-object subjected to gravity. The motion of the center of mass (c.m.) of the free object is coupled to its internal spin system magnetically, and a free flight scheme is developed based on coherent spin control. The wavepacket of the test object, under a spin-dependent force, may then be delocalized to a macroscopic scale. A gravity induced dynamical phase (accrued solely on the spin state, and measured through a Ramsey scheme) is used to reveal the above spatially delocalised superposition of the spin-nano-object composite system that arises during our scheme. We find a remarkable immunity to the motional noise in the c.m. (initially in a thermal state with moderate cooling), and also a dynamical decoupling nature of the scheme itself. Together they secure a high visibility of the resulting Ramsey fringes. The mass independence of our scheme makes it viable for a nano-object selected from an ensemble with a high mass variability. Given these advantages, a quantum superposition with 100 nm spatial separation for a massive object of 109 amu is achievable experimentally, providing a route to test postulated modifications of quantum theory such as continuous spontaneous localisation.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Issue: 14