We design a multimode interferometer with cold atoms confined in a harmonic trap. A first Kapitza-Dirac pulse creates several spatially addressable modes which are coherently recombined by the harmonic potential and mixed again by a second Kapitza-Dirac pulse. A phase shift among the mode is estimated by fitting the density profile or by measuring the number of atoms in each output mode. The expected sensitivity is rigorously calculated with the Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao lower bound. For the measurement of the gravitational acceleration $g$ we predict, with typical parameters of a compact setup, a temperature independent sensitivity which can exceed, by several orders of magnitude, the sensitivity of current atomic interferometers.

• Received 10 January 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.023003