The talk will describe our proposed measurement scheme described in: http://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10225
Authors: Jesse S. Schelfhout, Tom Hird, Kenneth Hughes and Chris Foot
Abstract of preprint:
The leading experimental determinations of the fine-structure constant, $\alpha$, currently rely on atomic photon-recoil measurements from Ramsey-Bord\'e atom interferometry with large momentum transfer to provide an absolute mass measurement. We propose an experimental scheme for an
intermediate-scale differential atom interferometer to measure the photon-recoil of neutral atomic species with a single-photon optical clock transition. We calculate trajectories for our scheme that optimise the recoil phase while nullifying the undesired gravity gradient phase by considering independently launching two clouds of ultracold atoms with the appropriate initial conditions. For Sr and Yb, we find an atom interferometer of height 3m to be sufficient for an absolute mass measurement precision of $\Delta m / m \sim 1\times 10^{-11}$ with current technology. Such a precise measurement (the first of its kind for Sr or Yb) would yield a factor of two reduction in the uncertainty of $\alpha$ -- an uncertainty that would no longer be limited by an absolute mass measurement. The removal of this bound facilitates reducing the uncertainty in $\alpha$ by a factor of 10 with improvements in relative mass measurements, thus paving the way for higher-precision tests of the Standard Model of particle physics.