Error and performance analysis of cold-atom inertial sensors for navigation

Abstract

Cold-atom inertial (CAI) sensors based on light-pulse atom interferometry show much promise for the next generation of navigation systems thanks to their low scale-factor and bias instability. Despite the high performance demonstrated in laboratory-based experiments, CAI technology is still far from being deployed in real-world navigation applications, and an analysis of the potential errors must be carried out in order to assess their impact on sensor performance. Within this context, we conduct a theoretical analysis to identify some of the most important error sources, disclose their physical mechanisms, and assess their impact on sensor performance. Through a multidisciplinary approach that combines different methodologies spanning from system engineering to quantum physics modeling, we analyse the response of the CAI sensor to several error sources, including scale-factor, bias, and noise, and establishing clear relations between system parameters and sensor performance. Particular emphasis is given to error sources stemming from the laseratom interaction during the Raman-pulse sequence and from state detection and imaging. Moreover, we present a method for optimizing beam-splitter pulses based on timedependent perturbation theory, demonstrating improvements in the simulated performance of a CAI sensor. Finally. due to its attractive multi-axial sensitivity and inherent capability to discriminate the acceleration from the rotational signal, we study in more detail errors sources in CAI sensors based on point-source interferometry. We therefore present a read-out method based on Kalman filtering to extract the interferometric phase map from interferograms, along with a compensation scheme for real-time calibration of the rotational scale-factor based on the integration of the CAI sensor with classical inertial sensors

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Identifiers

ORCID for Tim Freegarde: orcid.org/0000-0002-0680-1330

ORCID for James Gates: orcid.org/0000-0001-8671-5987

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