3 ms·
I don't know but I doubt it. That said, just now at the QG2023 conference a member of the Aspelmeyer group at IQOQI Univ. Vienna is presenting their work on a
by raattgift 3y ago
I don't know but I doubt it. That said, just now at the QG2023 conference a member of the Aspelmeyer group at IQOQI Univ. Vienna is presenting their work on an experiment where a mirror is mounted on a Cavendish torsion pendulum, and in order to do calibration and exclude sources of noises they have borrowed some protocols from LIGO. (Their lab is in central Vienna, near a couple of tram lines, and a 90-tonne tram passing 70m away induces a gravitational attraction on the same order as their test mass! When they test at night, they can also see the night busses in their spectral data.)
So there are similar issues with noise, but the mirror they're using in Vienna is small and light enough to suspend from a thin wire.
There are different things being detected: LIGO is interested in gravitational waves from the quadrupole moment of fairly-quickly-mutually-orbiting astrophysical binaries with many-light-second separations; this experimentalist (who just disclaimed deep theoretical familiarity as opposed to focusing on developing experiments) is looking for measuring the gravitational influence of very small masses (~microgram, with a move to a less-busy test location) and across very short distances (and his collaborators are interested in putting ever larger (but still << milligram) masses into quantum states).
PS: the speaker was Hans Hepach, a PhD student in the Aspelmeyer Group.