Seeded spin-mixing interferometry with long-time evolution in microwave-dressed sodium spinor Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

Abstract We experimentally demonstrate a new type of spin-mixing interferometry in sodium Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) based on seeded initial states. Seeding is useful because it speeds up the generation of entangled pairs, allowing many collisions to take place quickly, creating large populations in the arms of the interferometer. The entangled probe states of our interferometer are generated via spin-exchange collisions in F = 1 spinor BECs, where pairs of atoms with the magnetic quantum number m F = 0 collide and change into pairs with m F = ± 1 . Our results show that our seeded spin-mixing interferometer beats the standard quantum limit (SQL) with a metrological gain of 3.69 dB with spin-mixing time t = 10 ms in the case of single-sided seeding, and 3.33 dB with spin-mixing time t = 8 ms in the case of double sided seeding. The mechanism for beating the SQL is two-mode spin squeezing generated via spin-exchange collisions. Our results on spin-mixing interferometry with seeded states are useful for future quantum technologies such as quantum-enhanced microwave sensors, and quantum parametric amplifiers based on spin-mixing.