'Squeezed' light should detect waves of gravity from black holes

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"By literally squeezing light on a quantum level, we are refining our detection instruments to an extent never seen before,"

Einsteins theory of general relativity says that gravity ought to come in waves, just like light. The only catch is that the waves are generally mind-bendingly tiny - millions of times smaller than ordinary waves of light.

Basically how the experiment works is this: A powerful laser beam is split. The two beams then travel for a while, and are then recombined. Because light has wave- like properties, when the two beams are recombined, any change in the beams as they travel along a path before recombination will cause a disturbance that is measurable when you try to put them back together. It's sort of like if you and friend each went on a walk in opposite directions, and then when you saw each other next, you tried to guess where the other has been based on what's stuck to the other's shoes.

Scientists used the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in order to "squeeze" the light, thus giving them more precise measurements at the site of the detector, where vacuum fluctuations really become a problem.

Link to full Article Here

Makes me wish I were a scientist just so I could actually understand all this. It's awesome none-the-less.

Star and flag for you.

This is awesome. We're constantly discovering new ways of doing stuff. Can't wait for what we'll know in ten years.

reply to post by CeeRZ

s+f
just thinking out loud here. if the wave is found with this method then it is safe to speculate that in turn one could manipulate it locally (gravity waves) with the laser if frequency was known and could be emulated.
f.

If they do find gravity waves, I'll eat my (big, furry) hat. They have no idea what gravity is.

reply to post by CeeRZ

Scientists used the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in order to "squeeze" the light.

Until the above sentence is understood, the article makes no sense.

This Wikipedia page may help. Then again, it may not.

Originally posted by CeeRZ

Einsteins theory of general relativity says that gravity ought to come in waves, just like light. The only catch is that the waves are generally mind-bendingly tiny - millions of times smaller than ordinary waves of light.

Bold emphasis mine. Replace that with "infinitely smaller" and those "waves" would be more like a vector. Scientists must bring infinity into the equation to understand.

They send light along different paths with equal length a look if one of the paths takes longer, compare the phase(interferometry). If there is a shift something happend with the spacetime, like a gravity wave. The problem is that the phase follows a distribution due to uncertainty principle. The results are smudged. To work around this they modify the light to narrow the phase distribution(squeeze it) and get more amplitude noise instead. But they are looking for the phase anyway.

reply to post by moebius

Yes, this part is easily understood. But how is quantum entanglement involved in achieving it, as the article says it is?

reply to post by Astyanax

From my understanding the photons don't have to be entangled. But it is a way to increase the sqeezing: www.opfocus.org...

reply to post by moebius


somehow i had heard of this system before so i did some digging. it may be that this technique is little brother to the 'phase conjugate mirrior' system developed for the sdi 'star wars' system during reagans tenureship. due to atmospheric distortion constraints it was problematic for a high powered laser to target an incoming icbm and deliver enough power to said target. the solution was to emit two beams at the target and create a 'picture' of it.
this apparently resulted in an interference pattern of the distortion of the atmosphere. this pattern was then used as a grid in which the laser could target the icbm with high accuracy. it seems the distortion was almost totally removed from the equation. seems a very close relative imo.
f

reply to post by moebius

That was a pretty good, simplified explanation, moebius. Many thanks and a star for you.