12/18/2023 0 Comments Scitech daily![]() ![]() This greatly boosts LIGO’s ability to study the exotic events that shake space and time. This new “frequency-dependent squeezing” technology, in operation at LIGO since it turned back on in May of this year, means that the detectors can now probe a larger volume of the universe and are expected to detect about 60 percent more mergers than before. Now, writing in the journal Physical Review X, LIGO researchers report a significant advance in a quantum technology called “squeezing” that allows them to skirt around this limit and measure undulations in space-time across the entire range of gravitational frequencies detected by LIGO. ![]() At very tiny, subatomic scales, empty space is filled with a faint crackling of quantum noise, which interferes with LIGO’s measurements and restricts how sensitive the observatory can be. Credit: Georgia Mansell/LIGO Hanford Observatory Quantum Limitations and Technological AdvancesĪs incomprehensibly small as these measurements are, LIGO’s precision has continued to be limited by the laws of quantum physics. The picture was taken from one of the chamber’s viewports at a time when the squeezer was operational and pumped with green light. Here is a look at the technology that creates squeezed light in LIGO’s vacuum chamber. LIGO researchers at MIT, Caltech, and elsewhere 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. At the heart of LIGO’s success is its ability to measure the stretching and squeezing of the fabric of space-time on scales 10 thousand trillion times smaller than a human hair. National Science Foundation (NSF)-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. 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. Researchers using LIGO achieved a landmark in quantum squeezing. This breakthrough will increase its detection rate by 60 percent and pave the way for advancements in quantum technology and physics. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has improved its detection of cosmic events by overcoming quantum noise through advanced “squeezing” technology. ![]()
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