2 ms·
We would be incredibly stoked if we could drop that number to ten microns; nobody knows yet if that can be done. I'd be surprised if either we or the group at
by ISL 7y ago
We would be incredibly stoked if we could drop that number to ten microns; nobody knows yet if that can be done.
I'd be surprised if either we or the group at Huazhong University don't reach at least 35 microns by 2030. We all aspire to ~20 microns.
These all sound like small improvements, but Figure 5 tells the real story: reaching 10-microns requires a 3,000x improvement in sensitivity, in an environment where almost every experimental difficulty gets exponentially or power-law worse at short distances. That's why it is hard.
The field is ripe for a totally-new technology, but whatever it is will be deeply clever and revolutionary. I've spent the last 16 years of my life trying to figure out how to do it with limited success.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoYou say seismic vibrations increase the noise a lot but not, that I saw, anything about what measures you take against them? Presumably you do some sort of active noise cancelling for vibrations (like noise cancelling headphones)? Seismic noise must be a common problem in physics experiments, which other experiments have the best environmental vibration cancelling systems ... do people pay for use of them like they would for use of a space telescope?
- ISL 7y agoWe are moving from passive to active isolation now. The isolation that we need right now isn't too challenging. The hard part is ensuring that it doesn't disturb other properties of our instruments. We are sensitive to nanoradian rotations at millihertz frequencies, so we have to ensure that our isolation systems don't add any rotation noise. Regarding isolation-as-a-service: Most of these kinds of experiments run for many years in a university setting. The environmental requirements for each instrument vary widely, too. "Isolated-environment laboratories as a user facility" is an interesting idea to consider. I'm not sure if it would soar in the academic-research marketplace, but there might be a niche somewhere.