Controlling the cold collision shift in high precision atomic interferometry

Abstract

We present here a new method based on a transfer of population by adiabatic passage that allows to prepare cold atomic samples with a well defined ratio of atomic density and atom number. This method is used to perform a measurement of the cold collision frequency shift in a laser cooled cesium clock at the percent level, which makes the evaluation of the cesium fountains accuracy at the $10^{-16}$ level realistic. With an improved set-up, the adiabatic passage would allow measurements of atom number-dependent phase shifts at the $10^{-3}$ level in high precision experiments.