This work establishes a high-precision relativistic theoretical model: start from studying finite speed of light effect based on a coordinate transformation, and further extend the research methods to analyze the overall relativistic effects. This model promotes the development of testing General Relativity with atomic interferometry.
Today, relativistic calculations are known to provide a very successful means in the study of open-shell atoms and ions. But although accurate atomic data are obtained from these computations, they are traditionally carried out in jj-coupling and, hence, do often not allow for a simple LSJ classification of the atomic levels as needed by experiment. In fact, this lack of providing a proper spectroscopic notation from relativistic structure calculations has recently hampered not only the spectroscopy of medium and heavy elements, but also the interpretation and analysis of inner-shell processes, for which the occurrence of additional vacancies usually leads to a very detailed fine structure. Therefore, in order to facilitate the classification of atomic levels from such computations, here we present a program (within the Ratip environment) which help transform the atomic wave functions from jj-coupled multiconfiguration Dirac-Fock computations into a LS-coupled representation. Beside of a proper LSJ assignment to the atomic levels, the program also supports the full transformation of the wave functions if required for (nonrelativistic) computations.
A relativistic version of the effective charge model for computation of observable characteristics of multi-electron atoms and ions is developed. A complete and orthogonal Dirac hydrogen basis set, depending on one parameter -- effective nuclear charge $Z^{*}$ -- identical for all single-electron wave functions of a given atom or ion, is employed for the construction of the secondary-quantized representation. The effective charge is uniquely determined by the charge of the nucleus and a set of electron occupation numbers for a given state. We thoroughly study the accuracy of the leading-order approximation for the total binding energy and demonstrate that it is independent of the number of electrons of a multi-electron atom. In addition, it is shown that the fully analytical leading-order approximation is especially suited for the description of highly charged ions since our wave functions are almost coincident with the Dirac-Hartree-Fock ones for the complete spectrum. Finally, we evaluate various atomic characteristics, such as scattering factors and photoionization cross-sections, and thus envisage that the effective charge model can replace other models of comparable complexity, such as the Thomas-Fermi-Dirac model for all applications where it is still utilized.
We report on the study of the impact of the finite resolution of the chirp rate applied on the frequency difference between the Raman lasers beamsplitters onto the phase of a free fall atom gravimeter. This chirp induces a phase shift that compensates the one due to gravity acceleration, allowing for its precise determination in terms of frequencies. In practice, it is most often generated by a direct digital synthesizer (DDS). Besides the effect of eventual truncation errors, we evaluate here the bias on the g measurement due to the finite time and frequency resolution of the chirp generated by the DDS, and show that it can compromise the measurement accuracy. However, this effect can be mitigated by an adequate choice of the DDS chirp parameters resulting from a trade-off between interferometer phase resolution and induced bias.
We suggest to interface nanomechanical systems via an optical quantum bus to atomic ensembles, for which means of high precision state preparation, manipulation and measurement are available. This allows in particular for a Quantum Non-Demolition Bell measurement, projecting the coupled system, atomic ensemble - nanomechanical resonator, into an entangled EPR-state. The entanglement is observable even for nanoresonators initially well above their ground states and can be utilized for teleportation of states from an atomic ensemble to the mechanical system.