High Energy Physics Seminar - Michael Wentzel (UIUC) - A Superconductor Levitated Detector of Gravitational Waves at the Quantum Limit
Speaker: |
(sign-up)
Michael Wentzel(UIUC) |
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Date: | 4/12/2024 |
Time: | 11 a.m. |
Location: | Room 464 |
Event Contact: | Brandy Koebbe BKOEBBE@ILLINOIS.EDU |
Sponsor: | Department of Physics |
Event Type: | Seminar/Symposium |
A magnetically levitated mass couples to gravity and can act as a gravitational wave detector. We show that when excited by a gravitational wave, a superconducting sphere levitated in a quadrupolar magnetic field will produce fluctuations in the background magnetic field that can be read out using a radio frequency quantum upconverter. With a readout operating at the standard quantum limit, such a system achieves broadband strain noise sensitivity of h ~ 10^-21 for frequencies of ~1 MHz -1 GHz, opening new corridors for cosmological and astrophysical probes of new physics. |