Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms: A tool for metrological measurements

Abstract

We show that Bloch oscillations of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice are a strong tool to measure accurately some physical constants. We describe in this paper two experimental approaches using a pure and an accelerated vertical standing waves to perform respectively a determination of the local acceleration of gravity $g$ to ppm precision and of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ with a relative uncertainty of 6,7 ppb