Quantum Measurement Barrier Has Been Broken

[Solitary]

New technology that breaks the quantum measurement barrier has been developed to detect the gravity waves first predicted by Einstein in 1916.

Professor David Blair was one of 800 physicists from around the world who announced a breakthrough in measurement science last month.
"Gravitational wave astronomy is going to be the new astronomy that's likely to really revolutionise our understanding of the universe," he says.
"It will allow us to listen to the big bang and to black holes forming throughout the universe.
"These are detectors that can allow humanity to explore the beginning of time and the end of time."

According to current theory, time began with the big bang and ends in black holes.
Specialised equipment known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) uses laser beams to measure gravitational ripples of space and time.

The detector consists of an L-shaped vacuum system, four kilometres long, with mirrors at the ends.


Lasers directed at the mirrors are isolated from irrelevant vibrations by a vibration isolation system.

He says the addition of a new technique called 'quantum squeezing' at the world's largest gravitational wave detector allowed researchers to eliminate a lot of the 'noise' caused by quantum fluctuations.

"The recent announcement is the first implementation in a multi-kilometre detector."
"It proves that the quantum barrier [that] physicists thought would limit sensitivity can be overcome."
The new equipment has allowed the physicists to break the quantum measurement barrier, defined until recently by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

"This is a major breakthrough that makes us even more confident that in a few years we will begin to directly measure the ripples in space," he says.
As a result there is no lower limit on the amount of measurable energy, and extremely subtle gravitational waves will become detectable.

"These instruments represent the pinnacle of technology," he says.
"They've got the most perfect mirrors ever created, they've got the most powerful laser light that's ever been used in any measuring system.

"They've got a vacuum that is so good that the size of any leak would represent less than a teaspoon full of air leaking into it in about 300 years.

"They can measure the smallest amounts of energy that has ever been measured but the new method enables them measure even less.

"The uncertainties from empty space can be suppressed so as to measure something even smaller."
David Blair led a team of 16 physicists in Western Australia along with 800 physicists from around the world who announced the breakthrough in a paper just published in the journal Nature Photonics.  

Take that Heisenberg!  Solitary

[Colanth]

The writer added a lot of hyperbole.  All this says is that they can now account for quantum noise in the measurement.  It's as if we used to use 1 foot long sticks to measure things and now we have sticks marked in inches.  It's a tremendous increase in metrics, but not in the sciences involved.  (And if gravity comes in quanta - which is likely, since everything else does - there's still a lower limit to sensitivity.)

[stromboli]

Solitary, you post some good stuff on here. But you really, really need to post the links in order for us to further research these subjects.

[entropy]

http://www.nature.com/news/squeezed-lig ... se-1.13510

All light is plagued by quantum noise, especially at the low powers typically required by sensors. These energy fluctuations blur the defined peaks of classical light waves, fundamentally limiting the precision of measurements.

Squeezing the light can suppress some noise, but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle demands a trade-off. A squeeze that reduces noise in one dimension — the height of a light wave's peaks, for instance — must be balanced by a stretch that adds noise in another, such as the distance between the peaks. Researchers therefore have to match the direction of the squeezing to the direction of the measurement.

Efforts to put light-squeezing to use have so far focused on gravitational-wave detectors, which search for faint ripples in space-time by timing laser beams as they bounce between mirrors 4 kilometres apart. Passing ripples should stretch or compress the laser beams ever so slightly. But measurements with normal laser light are limited by quantum noise, and have so far failed to detect any disturbances attributable to gravitational waves.

Hoping to improve the next generation of measurements, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington, added a dose of squeezed light by passing laser light through a crystal. In July, they reported that they had achieved a sensitivity better than the standard limit imposed by quantum noise2. This represents a step towards the ultimate goal of doubling LIGO's sensitivity, says team member Nergis Mavalvala, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "We have to work hard to strip the noise out of the light," she says.

[Solitary]

Solitary, you post some good stuff on here. But you really, really need to post the links in order for us to further research these subjects.

Your wish is my command! http://pda.sciencealert.com.au/news/201 ... 648-2.html

http://www.scoop.it/t/amazing-science/p ... e-detector

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... inent.html

http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogsp ... en-by.html

[The Whit]

This is in Hanford, Washington?  I've got to go visit this if I can.

[Atheon]

After watching Breaking Bad, the name Heisenberg brings up a different association in my mind than before.