Utility of atomic kicked-rotor interferometers for precision measurements

We theoretically investigate a proposed scheme to use an atomic δ-kicked rotor resonance for high-precision measurements of accelerations and the photon recoil frequency. Although the technique offers rapid scaling of the measurement sensitivity with pulse number, it also features a high sensitivity to initial atomic momentum. We find that for realistic atom sources, the momentum sensitivity significantly limits the achievable precision. We consider several different variations on the technique, but find similar limitations in all cases.