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R_www.futurity.org 2015 00092.txt.txt

#Stuff never stops moving: How to measure quantum motion Drop a ball into a bowl, and it will roll back and forth a few times but will eventually come to rest at the bottom. While objects can appear to be motionless, at the atomic scale things are never totally at rest. Researchers have figured out how to observe and control this movement, known as quantum motion or noise. n the past couple of years, my group and a couple of other groups around the world have learned how to cool the motion of a small micrometer-scale object to produce this state at the bottom, or the quantum ground state, says Keith Schwab, a Caltech professor of physics and applied physics, who led the study published in Science. ut we know that even at the quantum ground state, at zero-temperature, very small amplitude fluctuationsr noiseemain. The micrometer-scale device consists of a flexible aluminum plate that sits atop a silicon substrate. The plate is coupled to a superconducting electrical circuit as the plate vibrates at a rate of 3. 5 million times per second. Because this quantum motion is theoretically an intrinsic part of the motion of all objects, Schwab and his colleagues designed a device that would allow them to observe this noise and then manipulate it. The micrometer-scale device consists of a flexible aluminum plate that sits atop a silicon substrate. The plate is coupled to a superconducting electrical circuit as the plate vibrates at a rate of 3. 5 million times per second. According to the laws of classical mechanics, the vibrating structures eventually will come to a complete rest if cooled to the ground state. But that is not what Schwab and his colleagues observed when they actually cooled the spring to the ground state in their experiments. Instead, the residual energyuantum noiseemained. his energy is part of the quantum description of natureou just can get it out, says Schwab. e all know quantum mechanics explains precisely why electrons behave weirdly. Here wee applying quantum physics to something that is relatively big, a device that you can see under an optical microscope, and wee seeing the quantum effects in a trillion atoms instead of just one. Because this noisy quantum motion is always present and cannot be removed, it places a fundamental limit on how precisely one can measure the position of an object. But that limit, Schwab and his colleagues discovered, is not insurmountable. The researchers and collaborators developed a technique to manipulate the inherent quantum noise and found that it is possible to reduce it periodically. Coauthors Aashish Clerk from Mcgill University and Florian Marquardt from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light proposed a novel method to control the quantum noise, which was expected to reduce it periodically. This technique was implemented then on a micron-scale mechanical device in Schwab low-temperature laboratory at Caltech. here are two main variables that describe the noise or movement, Schwab explains. e showed that we can actually make the fluctuations of one of the variables smallert the expense of making the quantum fluctuations of the other variable larger. hat is called what a quantum squeezed state; we squeezed the noise down in one place, but because of the squeezing, the noise has to squirt out in other places. But as long as those more noisy places aren where youe obtaining a measurement, it doesn matter. The ability to control quantum noise could one day be used to improve the precision of very sensitive measurements, such as those obtained by LIGO, the Laser interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory, a Caltech-and-MIT-led project searching for signs of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time. ee been thinking a lot about using these methods to detect gravitational waves from pulsarsncredibly dense stars that are the mass of our sun compressed into a 10 km radius and spin at 10 to 100 times a second, Schwab says. n the 1970s, Kip Thorne a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech and others wrote papers saying that these pulsars should be emitting gravity waves that are nearly perfectly periodic, so wee thinking hard about how to use these techniques on a gram-scale object to reduce quantum noise in detectors, thus increasing the sensitivity to pick up on those gravity waves, Schwab says. In order to do that, the current device would have to be scaled up. ur work aims to detect quantum mechanics at bigger and bigger scales, and one day our hope is that this will eventually start touching on something as big as gravitational waves, he says. The National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter supported the work d

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