From Optical Lattice Clocks to the Measurement of Forces in the Casimir Regime
Résumé
We propose a novel experiment based on atoms trapped close to a macroscopic surface, to study the interactions between the atoms and the surface at very small separations (0.6 to 10 µm). In this range the dominant potential is the QED interaction (Casimir-Polder and Van der Waals) between the surface and the atom. Additionally, several theoretical models suggest the possibility of Yukawa type potentials with sub-mm range, arising from new physics related to gravity. We propose a set-up very similar to neutral atom optical lattice clocks, but with the atoms trapped in lattice sites close to the reflecting mirror. A sequence of pulses of the probe laser at different frequencies is then used to create an interferometer with a coherent superposition between atomic states at different distances from the mirror. Assuming state of the art measurements, we expect that such an experiment would improve the best existing measurements of the atom-wall QED interaction by ≥2 orders of magnitude, whilst gaining up to 4 orders of magnitude on the best present limits on new interactions in the range between 100 nm and 100 µm.