Future Inertial Atomic Quantum Sensors

Atomic Quantum Sensors will be a key-technology for the ultra-precise monitoring of accelerations and rotations. These sensors evolved out of a new kind of optics based on matter waves rather than light waves. Matter waves optics is still a young, but rapidly progressing science, which recently generated Nobel-prize awarded inventions such as laser cooling and atom lasers. FINAQS aims to explore and to advance the latest inventions in this field and will convert them into a new technology for transportable atom interferometers. In three years FINAQS will design new types of interferometers based on coherent and brillant atomic sources as well as it will develop four transportable high-precision inertial sensors, particularly the first cold-atom quantum gyroscopes in the world. For this purposes FINAQS will join five European institutions, which are leading in this field, and lay the foundations for tightfuture cooperations. The potential of matter-wave optics for high precision sensors can be compared with that of SQUID technology, but without need for cryogenic equipment, or with that of atomic force microscopy for nanosciences. Finally, FINAQS will outline a roadmap for future integration of sensors and for relevant atom-optical techniques.