Abstract
Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China
It has long been expected to seek environments outside of the Earth for precision measurements with atom interferometry. The advantages include that to decouple the gravitational field for non-gravitational or variable gravitational experiments, to suppress the decoherence for precision measurement of atomic interference, and to explore applications for deep space navigation. However, due to the complexity of the technology and the high time and capital cost, the experiments of space atomic interference have only recently started. At the end of 2022, we successfully developed the dual-species 85Rb – 87Rb cold atom interferometer and loaded it on the microgravity cabinet of the Tianhe core module of the Chinese Space Station with the Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft. Microgravity atomic interference experiments have been conducted for more than a year. The two-component atomic interferometer was realized successively, by which the space cold atom gyro and acceleration sensing were performed, and the preliminary experiment of the equivalence principle test was carried out.