Gravitational wave detection with optical lattice atomic clocks

By S. Kolkowitz, I. Pikovski, N. Langellier, Mikhail D. Lukin, R. Walsworth, Jun Ye. 2016

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a space-based gravitational wave (GW) detector consisting of two spatially separated, drag-free satellites sharing ultrastable optical laser light over a single baseline. Each satellite contains an optical lattice atomic clock, which serves as a sensitive, narrowband detector of the local frequency of the shared laser light. A synchronized two-clock comparison between the satellites will be sensitive to the effective Doppler shifts induced by incident GWs at a level competitive with other proposed space-based GW detectors, while providing complementary features. The detected signal is a differential frequency shift of the shared laser light due to the relative velocity of the satellites, and the detection window can be tuned through the control sequence applied to the atoms' internal states. This scheme enables the detection of GWs from continuous, spectrally narrow sources, such as compact binary inspirals, with frequencies ranging from $\ensuremath{\sim}3\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{mHz}\char21{}10\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{Hz}$ without loss of sensitivity, thereby bridging the detection gap between space-based and terrestrial optical interferometric GW detectors. Our proposed GW detector employs just two satellites, is compatible with integration with an optical interferometric detector, and requires only realistic improvements to existing ground-based clock and laser technologies.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d92741cc7e1c9a5a1c9fe8f79a2845014854e40

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

ZAIGA: Zhaoshan long-baseline atom interferometer gravitation antenna (2019, unknown): “spacecraft with a distance of AU or more, like ASTRODGW[115], Super-ASTROD[116], INO[117], and the clock mission concepts in references[118–120].”
Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor (MAGIS-100) (2021, unknown): “These proposals are based both on optical lattice atomic clocks [7, 59] and atom interferometers [2, 9, 12, 60, 61], two technologies that are in fact closely related [62].”
Relaxion stars and their detection via atomic physics (2019, background): “[63] S.”
Micius quantum experiments in space (2022, methodology): “Furthermore, multiple space-based ultrahighprecision optical clocks are promising devices for detecting gravitational waves and dark matter, which particularly complement existing gravitational-wave-detection techniques by providing efficient detection in the 1–10 Hz frequency band (Kolkowitz et al.”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, methodology): “Kolkowitz et al. (2016) proposed to use a two-satellite scheme sharing ultrastable optical laser light over a single baseline, with atomic optical lattice clocks (rather than atom interferometers) as sensitive, narrowband detectors of the local frequency of the shared laser light.”