Fine-structure Raman interferometry with metastable barium for magnetically resilient inertial sensing
Abstract
Atom-interferometric quantum inertial sensors are promising candidates for inertial navigation systems owing to their high sensitivity and intrinsically low drift. However, their application to next-generation inertial navigation, targeting a drift below 100 m/month, requires exceptionally stringent inertial-sensor bias stability. In conventional Raman atom interferometers based on ground-state hyperfine transitions, suppressing inertial-sensor biases arising from quadratic Zeeman shifts requires highly optimized magnetic shielding. In this work, we propose a Raman atom interferometer based on fine-structure transitions between metastable states of barium, which exhibit a quadratic Zeeman sensitivity approximately three orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional alkali-atom Raman transitions. We show that the proposed scheme increases the allowable spatial gradient of the magnetic-field magnitude by a factor of several tens, thereby relaxing the magnetic-field-control requirements from highly optimized shielding and compensation systems to standard magnetic-field-control techniques. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate Mach--Zehnder interference between metastable fine-structure states of barium, validating a key building block of the proposed inertial-sensing scheme.
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BibTeX
@misc{nagamori2026finestructure,
title = {{Fine-structure Raman interferometry with metastable barium for magnetically resilient inertial sensing}},
author = {Masaki Nagamori and Hiromi Hatano and Toshiyuki Hosoya and Yuki Miyazawa and Tomoya Sato and Mikio Kozuma},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.20168},
eprint = {2610.20168},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20168},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fine-structure Raman interferometry with metastable barium for magnetically resilient inertial sensing
AU - Masaki Nagamori
AU - Hiromi Hatano
AU - Toshiyuki Hosoya
AU - Yuki Miyazawa
AU - Tomoya Sato
AU - Mikio Kozuma
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.20168
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20168
AB - Atom-interferometric quantum inertial sensors are promising candidates for inertial navigation systems owing to their high sensitivity and intrinsically low drift. However, their application to next-generation inertial navigation, targeting a drift below 100 m/month, requires exceptionally stringent inertial-sensor bias stability. In conventional Raman atom interferometers based on ground-state hyperfine transitions, suppressing inertial-sensor biases arising from quadratic Zeeman shifts requires highly optimized magnetic shielding. In this work, we propose a Raman atom interferometer based on fine-structure transitions between metastable states of barium, which exhibit a quadratic Zeeman sensitivity approximately three orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional alkali-atom Raman transitions. We show that the proposed scheme increases the allowable spatial gradient of the magnetic-field magnitude by a factor of several tens, thereby relaxing the magnetic-field-control requirements from highly optimized shielding and compensation systems to standard magnetic-field-control techniques. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate Mach--Zehnder interference between metastable fine-structure states of barium, validating a key building block of the proposed inertial-sensing scheme.
ER -