Enhanced gyroscope scale factor in an area-chirped array of coupled matter-wave interferometers

The utilization of atom interferometry for gyroscopes is of considerable interest because the detection of inertial rotations via the Sagnac effect has a potential 1010 greater sensitivity than optical gyroscopes. Here we analyze, in the presence of a rotation Ω, phase-coherent transport of atomic matter waves in a one-dimensional chain of N ring interferometers in which the sizes of the rings are chirped symmetrically about the center ring. The gyroscope scale factor of the area-chirped array for N 10 is several orders of magnitude larger than that for the unchirped array, which itself is larger than the scale factor of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with the same enclosed area. This enhancement is achieved with total enclosed areas that are larger or smaller than that of the unchirped array by less than 25%. As such, the area chirp achieves rotation sensitivities with N 10 interferometers that would normally require N 100 rings of identical sizes.