"Quantum trampoline" measures gravity - 2 views
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Physicists in France have come up with a new way of using bouncing ultracold atoms to measure the acceleration due to gravity. The technique involves firing vertical laser pulses at a collection of free-falling atoms, which bounces some atoms higher than others. When the atoms recombine at the centre of the experiment, they create an interference pattern that reveals that g is 9.809 m/s2 – just as expected for their Paris lab.
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That's the lab I worked... -
just being cinical ... but did not we know that g = 9.809 in Paris? I can also create a complex measurement procedure that will held pi = 3.1415, just as expected!!! -
well, sure... the interest of such gravimeter is to be absolute, and for now slightly more accurate than the other type of absolute gravimeter which uses retroreflector and interferometry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravimeter ). While the latter ones reached their limit in term of sensitivity, the atomic ones can be enhanced in many ways (using cooler atoms, better optics, etc...)
