Integrable active atom interferometry

Abstract Active interferometers are designed to enhance phase sensitivity beyond the standard quantum limit by generating entanglement inside the interferometer. An atomic version of such a device can be constructed by means of a spinor Bose–Einstein condensate with an F = 1 groundstate manifold in which spin-changing collisions (SCCs) create entangled pairs of m = ±1 atoms. We use Bethe Ansatz techniques to find exact eigenstates and eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian that models such SCCs. Using these results, we express the interferometer’s phase sensitivity, Fisher information, and Hellinger distance in terms of the Bethe rapidities. By evaluating these expressions we study scaling properties and the interferometer’s performance under the full Hamiltonian that models the SCCs, i.e., without the idealising approximations of earlier works that force the model into the framework of SU(1,1) interferometry.