double well for atom chip based sensors

We report on the adiabatic splitting of a BEC of Rb atoms by an asymmetric double-well potential located above the edge of a perpendicularly magnetized TbGdFeCo film atom chip. By controlling the barrier height and double-well asymmetry the sensitivity of the axial splitting process is investigated through observation of the fractional atom distribution between the left and right wells. This process constitutes a novel sensor for which we infer a single shot sensitivity to gravity fields of δg/g ≈ 2 × 10. From a simple analytic model we propose improvements to chip-based gravity detectors using this demonstrated methodology.