Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments

There is currently a lack of experiments that would prove whether gravity exists as a quantum field. One possible proof of the quantum nature of gravity would be to entangle massive quantum harmonic oscillators. This quantum harmonic oscillator acts as a resonant sensor for the entanglement with gra...

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Main Author: Fife, Dylan
Other Authors: Sudhir, Vivishek
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151896
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author Fife, Dylan
author2 Sudhir, Vivishek
author_facet Sudhir, Vivishek
Fife, Dylan
author_sort Fife, Dylan
collection MIT
description There is currently a lack of experiments that would prove whether gravity exists as a quantum field. One possible proof of the quantum nature of gravity would be to entangle massive quantum harmonic oscillators. This quantum harmonic oscillator acts as a resonant sensor for the entanglement with gravity. The quality factor of a resonant sensor must be sufficiently high such that the sensor is not dominated by thermal noise and the sensor can be cooled to the ground state. This thesis creates scaling laws for the interaction between the mass size bonded to a membrane resonator and the resonator's quality factor. With such a resonator, the entanglement is anticipated to be weak and requires extensive averaging to achieve statistically significant measurements. As such, the creation of a long time stable environment is critical. Thus, the lab temperature where the experiment will be run was stabilized to an integrated deviation of 20mK from 1K. This resulted in a reduction of laser position noise by a factor of 2.7x.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1518962023-08-24T03:00:44Z Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments Fife, Dylan Sudhir, Vivishek Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering There is currently a lack of experiments that would prove whether gravity exists as a quantum field. One possible proof of the quantum nature of gravity would be to entangle massive quantum harmonic oscillators. This quantum harmonic oscillator acts as a resonant sensor for the entanglement with gravity. The quality factor of a resonant sensor must be sufficiently high such that the sensor is not dominated by thermal noise and the sensor can be cooled to the ground state. This thesis creates scaling laws for the interaction between the mass size bonded to a membrane resonator and the resonator's quality factor. With such a resonator, the entanglement is anticipated to be weak and requires extensive averaging to achieve statistically significant measurements. As such, the creation of a long time stable environment is critical. Thus, the lab temperature where the experiment will be run was stabilized to an integrated deviation of 20mK from 1K. This resulted in a reduction of laser position noise by a factor of 2.7x. S.M. 2023-08-23T16:17:24Z 2023-08-23T16:17:24Z 2023-06 2023-07-19T18:45:10.800Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151896 0000-0003-4999-4600 In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted Copyright retained by author(s) https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Fife, Dylan
Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title_full Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title_fullStr Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title_full_unstemmed Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title_short Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments
title_sort temperature and thermal noise suppression for precision mechanical experiments
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151896
work_keys_str_mv AT fifedylan temperatureandthermalnoisesuppressionforprecisionmechanicalexperiments