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High Energy Physics Seminar - Michael Wentzel (UIUC) - A Superconductor Levitated Detector of Gravitational Waves at the Quantum Limit

Speaker: Michael Wentzel(UIUC)
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.