Keynote Speakers

Demand for location aware platforms has given rise to increasingly sophisticated location aware platforms that can require centimeter accuracy in challenging environments. A strategy to meet these opportunities is to employ a variety of sensors and signals and play to their strengths utilizing machine learning situational awareness models. This presentation will provide an overview of how inertial sensors and sensor fusion techniques are applied to extended reality, automotive, and interplanetary use cases.

I will describe a new approach to inertial sensing using atom interferometry that takes advantage of the narrow linewidth transitions used by the best atomic clocks in the world. These hybrid “clock” atom interferometers offer a number of advantages, including the possibility of substantially improved sensitivity using enhanced matter wave optics that increase the enclosed space-time area of the interferometer. In particular, I will show results demonstrating large momentum transfer (LMT) atom optics that achieve a record-setting momentum separation between the interferometer arms of over 400 ћk. Unlike previous work in LMT enhancement, clock atom interferometry supports the use of comparatively ‘hot’ atoms, substantially reducing the complexity of atom cooling requirements for an applied sensor. Clock atom interferometry also has broad potential applications in fundamental physics experiments which I will describe, and is central to the MAGIS-100 experiment, a 100-meter-tall atomic sensor under construction at Fermilab that will probe for ultra-light dark matter candidates and will serve as a prototype for a future gravitational wave detector.use cases.

Ultra-cold quantum gases promise to boost the sensitivity and accuracy of inertial matter-wave interferometers. Benefiting from the low expansion energies, novel methods to coherently manipulate the atomic ensembles with high efficiencies, such as twin-lattice interferometry, allow to create interferometers featuring (i) large space-time areas, (ii) discrimination of accelerations and rotations as well as (iii) Sagnac interferometers performing multiple loops. As the sensitivity of these devices increases with the time spent by the atoms in the interferometer, sensors operated in space may reach even higher precision. We take benefit of various microgravity platforms such as the Bremen drop tower, the Einstein elevator in Hannover, sounding rockets and the international space station to advance the necessary methods for space-borne inertial sensing.