Observation of a room-temperature oscillator’s motion dominated by quantum fluctuations over a broad audio-frequency band
Name
1802.10069.pdf
Description
Submitted version
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370.06 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cripe, Jonathan
Aggarwal, Nancy
Lanza, Robert
Libson, Adam
Singh, Robinjeet
Heu, Paula
Follman, David
Cole, Garrett D
Mavalvala, Nergis
Corbitt, Thomas
Alternative Title
Measurement of quantum back action in the audio band at room temperature
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Cripe, Jonathan, Aggarwal, Nancy, Lanza, Robert, Libson, Adam, Singh, Robinjeet et al. 2019. "Observation of a room-temperature oscillator’s motion dominated by quantum fluctuations over a broad audio-frequency band." Nature, 568 (7752).
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
© 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the precision of continuous measurements. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that as the precision of a measurement of an observable (for example, position) increases, back action creates increased uncertainty in the conjugate variable (for example, momentum). In interferometric gravitational-wave detectors, higher laser powers reduce the position uncertainty created by shot noise (the photon-counting error caused by the quantum nature of the laser) but necessarily do so at the expense of back action in the form of quantum radiation pressure noise (QRPN)1. Once at design sensitivity, the gravitational-wave detectors Advanced LIGO2, VIRGO3 and KAGRA4 will be limited by QRPN at frequencies between 10 hertz and 100 hertz. There exist several proposals to improve the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors by mitigating QRPN5–10, but until now no platform has allowed for experimental tests of these ideas. Here we present a broadband measurement of QRPN at room temperature at frequencies relevant to gravitational-wave detectors. The noise spectrum obtained shows effects due to QRPN between about 2 kilohertz and 100 kilohertz, and the measured magnitude of QRPN agrees with our model. We now have a testbed for studying techniques with which to mitigate quantum back action, such as variational readout and squeezed light injection7, with the aim of improving the sensitivity of future gravitational-wave detectors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41586-019-1051-4
