Cold Atom Lab - Fundamental Interactions for Atom Interferometry with Ultracold Quantum Gases in a Microgravity Environment

Precision atom interferometers (AI) in space promise exciting technical capabilities with diverse applications of interest to NASA. These quantum sensors are particularly relevant for fundamental physics research, with proposals including unprecedented tests of the validity of the weak equivalence principle, precision measurements of the fine structure and gravitational constants, and detection of gravity waves and dark matter/dark energy. This investigation will utilize the capabilities of NASA's multi-user Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), in the microgravity environment onboard the International Space Station (ISS), to study mitigation schemes for the leading-order systematics expected to limit future high-precision measurements of fundamental physics with AIs in microgravity. The flight experiments, supported by theoretical investigations and ground studies at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will concentrate on the physics of pairwise interactions and molecular dynamics in ultracold quantum gases as a means to overcome uncontrolled AI shifts associated with the gravity gradient and few-particle collisions. A space-based dual-species AI will be further developed and used, which is planned as an on-orbit upgrade to the CAL science module after approximately a year of science investigations, for proof-of-principle tests of systematic mitigations and phase-readout techniques for use in the next-generation of precision metrology experiments based on AIs in microgravity. The proposed studies require the effective position invariance, long free fall times, and extremely low temperature samples uniquely available with the CAL apparatus. It is anticipated that these studies can lead to the unprecedented level of control and accuracy necessary for AIs to explore some of the most fundamental physical concepts in nature.