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Atomic accelerometers and gravimeters are usually based on freely falling atoms in atomic fountains, which not only limits their size but also their robustness to environmental factors, such as tilts, magnetic fields, and vibrations. Such limitations have precluded their broad adoption in the field, for geophysics, geology, and inertial navigation. More recently, atom interferometers based on holding atoms in an optical lattice have been developed. Such gravimeters also suppress the influence of vibrations in the frequency range of ∼1 Hz and above by several orders of magnitude relative to conventional atomic gravimeters. Here, we show that such interferometers are robust to tilts of more than 8 mrad with respect to the vertical and can suppress the effect of even strong environmental magnetic fields and field gradients by using atoms in the F=3, 4 hyperfine ground states as co-magnetometers, potentially eliminating the need for shielding. We demonstrate gravimeter sensitivity of 0.7 mGal/Hz (1 mGal = 10 μm/s2) in a compact geometry where atoms only travel over millimeters of space.

We prepared a sample of mono-deuterated oxirane and studied its rotational spectrum in the laboratory between 490 and 1060 GHz in order to improve its spectroscopic parameters and consequently the calculated rest frequencies of its rotational transitions. The updated rest frequencies were employed to detect c-C2H3DO for the first time in the interstellar medium in the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array Protostellar Interferometric Line Survey (PILS) of the Class 0 protostellar system IRAS 16293−2422. Fits of the detected lines using the rotation diagrams yield a temperature of Trot = 103 ± 19 K, which in turn agrees well with 125 K derived for the c-C2H4O main isotopologue previously. The c-C2H3DO to c-C2H4O ratio is found to be ∼0.15 corresponding to a D-to-H ratio of ∼0.036 per H atom, which is slightly higher than the D-to-H ratio of species such as methanol, formaldehyde, and ketene but lower than those of the larger complex organic species such as ethanol, methyl formate, and glycolaldehyde. This may reflect that oxirane is formed fairly early in the evolution of the prestellar cores. The identification of doubly deuterated oxirane isotopomers in the PILS data may be possibly judged by the amount of mono-deuterated oxirane and the observed trend that multiply deuterated isotopologues have higher deuteration rates than their mono-deuterated variants.

Atom interferometers are powerful tools for both measurements in fundamental physics and inertial sensing applications. Their performance, however, has been limited by the available interrogation time of freely falling atoms in a gravitational field. By suspending the spatially separated atomic wave packets in a lattice formed by the mode of an optical cavity, we realize an interrogation time of 20 seconds. Our approach allows gravitational potentials to be measured by holding, rather than dropping, atoms. After seconds of hold time, gravitational potential energy differences from as little as micrometers of vertical separation generate megaradians of interferometer phase. This trapped geometry suppresses the phase variance due to vibrations by three to four orders of magnitude, overcoming the dominant noise source in atom-interferometric gravimeters.