Observing the effect of wave-front aberrations in an atom interferometer by modulating the diameter of Raman beams

Abstract

The effect of wavefront aberrations is one of the most important systematic errors in atom interferometers and limits the accuracy of precision atom gravimeters. A detailed theoretical analysis of this effect is presented, and a theoretical method for observing this effect is proposed and demonstrated in experiment. In addition, with this method, the surface quality of the optical elements in the Raman system was measured with a rms resolution of $0.01\ensuremath{\lambda}$.