Aging, Spirituality, and Narrative: Loss and Repair

In this paper, we explore how narrative loss may impact upon one’s sense of self and the spiritual process of meaning-making and purpose. We argue that we are narrative beings that make sense of our selves and our social, physical, and ideational worlds in and through narrative and that this process, which involves matters of purpose, truth, and values, is at one and the same time a spiritual activity, as both spirituality and narrative involve a sense of openness and indeterminacy, and the generation of meaning and purpose. As we age, however, physical, mental and social changes may disrupt how we narrativize our lives, and social and ideological (or meta-) narratives might frame what stories we can tell, and how we can tell them, in ways different from the past. We explore some of the narrative losses associated with aging and then, drawing on practices in spiritual direction, discuss some possible ways of countering such losses, in particular the development of narrative literacy, the re-ignition of narrative desire, the making of narrative connections, and the deepening of autobiographical reasoning. In this way, we hope to illustrate how narrative works in the spiritual lives of older adults

Influence of the Coriolis force in atom interferometry

In a light-pulse atom interferometer, we use a tip-tilt mirror to remove the influence of the Coriolis force from Earth's rotation and to characterize configuration space wave packets. For interferometers with large momentum transfer and large pulse separation time, we improve the contrast by up to 350% and suppress systematic effects. We also reach what is to our knowledge the largest spacetime area enclosed in any atom interferometer to date. We discuss implications for future high performance instruments.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Force-Free Gravitational Redshift: Proposed Gravitational Aharonov-Bohm experiment

We propose a feasible laboratory interferometry experiment with matter waves in a gravitational potential caused by a pair of artificial field-generating masses. It will demonstrate that the presence of these masses (and, for moving atoms, time dilation) induces a phase shift, even if it does not cause any classical force. The phase shift is identical to that produced by the gravitational redshift (or time dilation) of clocks ticking at the atom's Compton frequency. In analogy to the Aharonov-Bohm effect in electromagnetism, the quantum mechanical phase is a function of the gravitational potential and not the classical forces.Comment: Updated to published versio

High-resolution atom interferometers with suppressed diffraction phases

We experimentally and theoretically study the diffraction phase of large-momentum transfer beam splitters in atom interferometers based on Bragg diffraction. We null the diffraction phase and increase the sensitivity of the interferometer by combining Bragg diffraction with Bloch oscillations. We demonstrate agreement between experiment and theory, and a 1500-fold reduction of the diffraction phase, limited by measurement noise. In addition to reduced systematic effects, our interferometer has high contrast with up to 4.4 million radians of phase difference, and a resolution in the fine structure constant of $\delta \alpha/\alpha=0.25\,$ppb in 25 hours of integration time.Comment: Added appendix and explanations. 6 pages, 4 figure

Gravitational Redshift, Equivalence Principle, and Matter Waves

We review matter wave and clock comparison tests of the gravitational redshift. To elucidate their relationship to tests of the universality of free fall (UFF), we define scenarios wherein redshift violations are coupled to violations of UFF ("type II"), or independent of UFF violations ("type III"), respectively. Clock comparisons and atom interferometers are sensitive to similar effects in type II and precisely the same effects in type III scenarios, although type III violations remain poorly constrained. Finally, we describe the "Geodesic Explorer," a conceptual spaceborne atom interferometer that will test the gravitational redshift with an accuracy 5 orders of magnitude better than current terrestrial redshift experiments for type II scenarios and 12 orders of magnitude better for type III.Comment: Work in progress. 11 page

Scalable Multispecies Ion Transport in a Grid Based Surface-Electrode Trap

We present a scalable method for the control of ion crystals in a grid-based surface electrode Paul trap and characterize it in the context of transport operations that sort and reorder multispecies crystals. By combining co-wiring of control electrodes at translationally symmetric locations in each grid site with the site-wise ability to exchange the voltages applied to two special electrodes gated by a binary input, site-dependent operations are achieved using only a fixed number of analog voltage signals and a single digital input per site. In two separate experimental systems containing nominally identical grid traps, one using $^{171}\mathrm{Yb}^{+}$-$^{138}\mathrm{Ba}^{+}$ crystals and the other $^{137}\mathrm{Ba}^{+}$-$^{88}\mathrm{Sr}^{+}$, we demonstrate this method by characterizing the conditional intra-site crystal reorder and the conditional exchange of ions between adjacent sites on the grid. Averaged across a multi-site region of interest, we measure sub-quanta motional excitation in the axial in-phase and out-of-phase modes of the crystals following these operations at exchange rates of 2.5 kHz. These conditional transport operations display all necessary components for sorting qubits, and could be extended to implement other conditional operations involving control fields such as gates, initialization, and measurement.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Precision Measurement in Atom Interferometry Using Bragg Diffraction

We experimentally and theoretically study Bragg diffraction as a tool for large-momentum transfer beam splitters in atom interferometry. A theoretical framework is developed to quantify the diffraction phase systematic caused by Bragg diffraction and experiments are performed to confirm these predictions using a Ramsey-Bord\'e atom interferometer. We then develop methods to systematically cancel and reduce the diffraction phase systematic by carefully selecting Bragg diffraction parameters and utilizing Bloch oscillations. These techniques are then applied to an ongoing precision measurement of $h/m_\text{Cs}$ for cesium, with the end goal of measuring the fine structure constant $\alpha$. We demonstrate a high contrast simultaneous conjugate Ramsey-Bord\'e interferometer using 5th order Bragg diffraction and 25 common mode Bloch oscillations which achieves $2.5\times 10^6$ radians of phase. We also demonstrate an interferometer with a statistical uncertainty of $\delta \alpha/\alpha=0.25$ ppb after 25 hours of integration time that has diffraction phase systematic error of around 1 ppb. Other sources of systematic uncertainty are also thoroughly explored and determined to better than 0.1 ppb. The techniques and theories developed in this thesis will hopefully help enable future precision measurements based on Bragg diffraction