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Europhysics news

Quantum vibrations – sound waves shake photonic quantum technologies

Birgit Stiller

Published Jan 1, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In physics experiments, mechanical and acoustic vibrations are often considered as disturbing noise and a nuisance. For example, the field of optomechanics came to life because of gravitation waves. To achieve the extreme sensitivity required to detect tiny distortions in spacetime caused by passing gravitational waves, it is crucial to overcome any noisy environments.

DOI
10.1051/epn/2025215

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In physics experiments, mechanical and acoustic vibrations are often considered as disturbing noise and a nuisance. For example, the field of optomechanics came to life because of gravitation waves. To achieve the extreme sensitivity required to detect tiny distortions in spacetime caused by passing gravitational waves, it is crucial to overcome any noisy environments.
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Abstract Although the classical examples of harmonic oscillators such as springs or the simple pendulum are of limited use in the submicroscopic world of quantum mechanics, there are plenty of other applications that make the oscillator worth studying. Atoms in a crystal, for instance, oscillate about their mean positions and it is their vibrations that carry sound and heat through the material. Indeed, we know from classical theory that by using normal coordinates we may regard any system performing small oscillations about a point of stable equilibrium as a collection of harmonic oscillators. This extends even to the normal modes of vibration of a string or of the electromagnetic field. The harmonic oscillator thus provides the key to understanding how wave phenomena such as light can be quantized, and lies at the heart of Einstein’s idea of the photon and of Planck’s quantum.
Atom interferometers are quantum mechanical devices sensitive to gravitational and inertial forces, with applications in fundamental physics and inertial sensing in the field. Their performance is currently limited by the interrogation time available to freely falling atoms in Earth’s gravitational field, as well as noise due to mechanical and acoustic vibrations. Our experiment probes gravitational potentials by holding, rather than dropping, atoms. We realize an interrogation time of 20 seconds by suspending the spatially separated atomic wave packets in an optical lattice. This record coherence is enabled by the smooth lattice wave fronts, which are mode-filtered by an optical cavity. This trapped geometry suppresses phase variance due to vibrations by three to four orders of magnitude, overcoming the dominant noise source in atom-interferometric gravimeters. The later part of the talk describes recent progress in characterizing and reducing dephasing of the interferometer. An upgraded optical lattice interferometer experiment is currently being commissioned, with the goal of increased sensitivity to gravity.
The recent detections of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations have opened the field of GW astronomy, intensifying interest in GWs and other possible detectors sensitive in different frequency ranges. Although strong GW producing events are rare and currently unpredictable, GWs can in principle be simulated in analogue systems at will in the lab. Simulation of GWs in a manifestly quantum system would allow for the study of the interaction of quantum phenomena with GWs. Such predicted interaction is exploited in a recently proposed Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) based GW detector. In this paper, we show how to manipulate a BEC to mimic the effect of a passing GW. By simultaneously varying the external potential applied to the BEC, and an external magnetic field near a Feshbach resonance, we show that the resulting change in speed of sound can directly reproduce a GW metric. We also show how to simulate a metric used in the recently proposed BEC based GW detector, to provide an environment for testing the proposed metrology scheme of the detector. Explicit expressions for simulations of various GW sources are given. This result is also useful to generally test the interaction of quantum phenomena with GWs in a curved spacetime analogue experiment.