Supervisor: 

Prof. Ed. Hinds

Inertial sensing by atom interferometry in a noisy environment

The current inertial navigation systems (INS) are limited by the long-term stability due to their drifting bias. Raman interferometry using cold atoms presents an attractive solution to this problem, as atoms’ physical properties do not change over time. The aim of this PhD project is to build a three-dimensional hybrid atom accelerometer, which combines the large operation range of a classical high-bandwidth accelerometer with the sensitivity provided by atom interferometer. This is able to perform few orders of magnitudes better than the state-of-the-art accelerometer and will be incorporated into a navigation system in a noisy real life environment.