TAMA300 Blazes Trail for Improved Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Overview of the press release
A team at NAOJ composed of members of the in-house Gravitational Wave Science Project and the KAGRA collaboration (but also including researchers of the Virgo and GEO collaborations) has recently demonstrated the feasibility of a technique known as frequency dependent vacuum squeezing, at the frequencies useful for gravitational wave detectors. Because the detector itself interacts with the electromagnetic fields differently depending on the frequency, the team used the infrastructure of the former TAMA300 detector to create a field which itself varies depending on frequency. A normal (frequency independent) squeezed vacuum field is reflected off an optical cavity 300-m long, such that a frequency dependence is imprinted and it is able counteract the optomechanical effect of the interferometer.
This technique will allow improved sensitivity at both high and low frequencies simultaneously. This is a crucial result demonstrating a key-technology to improve the sensitivity of future detectors. Its implementation, planned as a near term upgrade together with other improvements, is expected to double the observation range of second-generation detectors.
These results appeared as Zhao, Y., et al. “Frequency-dependent squeezed vacuum source for broadband quantum noise reduction in advanced gravitational-wave detectors” in Physical Review Letters on April 28, 2020. A similar result has been obtained by a group in MIT using a 16-m filter cavity, and the two papers have been published jointly.
Figure 1: Vacuum chambers in the infrastructure of the former TAMA300 detector used in this experiment.
Credit: NAOJ.
To read the full press release, please visit the NAOJ website.
Doctoral student Naoki Aritomi (Department of Pysics, Graduate School of Science) participated in this research.
Publication details
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Journal Physical Review Letters Title Frequency-Dependent Squeezed Vacuum Source for Broadband Quantum Noise Reduction in Advanced Gravitational-Wave Detectors Authors Yuhang Zhao, Naoki Aritomi, Eleonora Capocasa, Matteo Leonardi, Marc Eisenmann, Yuefan Guo, Eleonora Polini, Akihiro Tomura, Koji Arai, Yoichi Aso, Yao-Chin Huang, Ray-Kuang Lee, Harald Lück, Osamu Miyakawa, Pierre Prat, Ayaka Shoda, Matteo Tacca, Ryutaro Takahashi, Henning Vahlbruch, Marco Vardaro, Chien-Ming Wu, Matteo Barsuglia, Raffaele Flaminio Paper link https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.171101
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