Researchers report a significant advance in quantum squeezing, which allows them to measure undulations in space-time across the entire range of gravitational frequencies detected by LIGO.
In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, produced by a pair of colliding black holes. Since then, the U.S. National Science Foundation -funded LIGO and its sister detector in Europe, Virgo, have detected gravitational waves from dozens of mergers between black holes as well as from collisions between a related class of stellar remnants called neutron stars.
"A project of this scale requires multiple people, from facilities to engineering and optics -- basically the full extent of the LIGO Lab with important contributions from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. It was a grand effort made even more challenging by the pandemic," Barsotti says. The term squeezing refers to the fact that light can be manipulated like a balloon animal. To make a dog or giraffe, one might pinch one section of a long balloon into a small precisely located joint. But then the other side of the balloon will swell out to a larger, less precise size. Light can similarly be squeezed to be more precise in one trait, such as its frequency, but the result is that it becomes more uncertain in another trait, such as its power.
However, the quantum noise that lurks inside the vacuum tubes that encase LIGO's laser beams can alter the timing of the photons in the beams by minutely small amounts. McCuller likens this uncertainty in the laser light to a can of BBs."Imagine dumping out a can full of BBs. They all hit the ground and click and clack independently. The BBs are randomly hitting the ground, and that creates a noise.
"Even though we are using squeezing to put order into our system, reducing the chaos, it doesn't mean we are winning everywhere," says Dhruva Ganapathy, a graduate student at MIT and one of four co-lead authors of the new study."We are still bound by the laws of physics." The other three lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Wenxuan Jia, LIGO Livingston postdoc Masayuki Nakano, and MIT postdoc Victoria Xu.
"It is true that we are doing this really cool quantum thing, but the real reason for this is that it's the simplest way to improve LIGO's sensitivity," Ganapathy says."Otherwise, we would have to turn up the laser, which has its own problems, or we would have to greatly increase the sizes of the mirrors, which would be expensive."
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