Approaching the motional ground state of a 10-kg object

Creators: Whittle, Chris; Hall, Evan D.; Dwyer, Sheila; Mavalvala, Nergis; Sudhir, Vivishek; Abbott, R.; Ananyeva, A.; Austin, C.; Barsotti, L.; Betzwieser, J.; Blair, C. D.; Brooks, A. F.; Brown, D. D.; Buikema, A.; Cahillane, C.; Driggers, J. C.; Effler, A.; Fernandez-Galiana, A.; Fritschel, P.; Frolov, V. V.; Hardwick, T.; Kasprzack, M.; Kawabe, K.; Kijbunchoo, N.; Kissel, J. S.; Mansell, G. L.; Matichard, F.; McCuller, L.; McRae, T.; Mullavey, A.; Pele, A.; Schofield, R. M. S.; Sigg, D.; Tse, M.; Vajente, G.; Vander-Hyde, D. C.; Yu, Hang; Yu, Haocun; Adams, C.; Adhikari, R. X.; Appert, S.; Arai, K.; Areeda, J. S.; Asali, Y.; Aston, S. M.; Baer, A. M.; Ball, M.; Ballmer, S. W.; Banagiri, S.; Barker, D.; Bartlett, J.; Berger, B. K.; Bhattacharjee, D.; Billingsley, G.; Biscans, S.; Blair, R. M.; Bode, N.; Booker, P.; Bork, R.; Bramley, A.; Cannon, K. C.; Chen, X.; Ciobanu, A. A.; Clara, F.; Compton, C. M.; Cooper, S. J.; Corley, K. R.; Countryman, S. T.; Covas, P. B.; Coyne, D. C.; Datrier, L. E. H.; Davis, D.; Di Fronzo, C.; Dooley, K. L.; Dupej, P.; Etzel, T.; Evans, M.; Evans, T. M.; Feicht, J.; Fulda, P.; Fyffe, M.; Giaime, J. A.; Giardina, K. D.; Godwin, P.; Goetz, E.; Gras, S.; Gray, C.; Gray, R.; Green, A. C.; Gustafson, E. K.; Gustafson, R.; Hanks, J.; Hanson, J.; Hasskew, R. K.; Heintze, M. C.; Helmling-Cornell, A. F.; Holland, N. A.; Jones, J. D.; Kandhasamy, S.; Karki, S.; King, P. J.; Kumar, Rahul; Landry, M.; Lane, B. B.; Lantz, B.; Laxen, M.; Lecoeuche, Y. K.; Leviton, J.; Liu, J.; Lormand, M.; Lundgren, A. P.; Macas, R.; MacInnis, M.; Macleod, D. M.; Márka, S.; Márka, Z.; Martynov, D. V.; Mason, K.; Massinger, T. J.; McCarthy, R.; McClelland, D. E.; McCormick, S.; McIver, J.; Mendell, G.; Merfeld, K.; Merilh, E. L.; Meylahn, F.; Mistry, T.; Mittleman, R.; Moreno, G.; Mow-Lowry, C. M.; Mozzon, S.; Nelson, T. J. N.; Nguyen, P.; Nuttall, L. K.; Oberling, J.; Oram, Richard J.; Osthelder, C.; Ottaway, D. J.; Overmier, H.; Palamos, J. R.; Parker, W.; Payne, E.; Penhorwood, R.; Perez, C. J.; Pirello, M.; Radkins, H.; Ramirez, K. E.; Richardson, J. W.; Riles, K.; Robertson, N. A.; Rollins, J. G.; Romel, C. L.; Romie, J. H.; Ross, M. P.; Ryan, K.; Sadecki, T.; Sanchez, E. J.; Sanchez, L. E.; Saravanan, T. R.; Savage, R. L.; Schaetzl, D.; Schnabel, R.; Schwartz, E.; Sellers, D.; Shaffer, T.; Slagmolen, B. J. J.; Smith, J. R.; Soni, S.; Sorazu, B.; Spencer, A. P.; Strain, K. A.; Sun, L.; Szczepańczyk, M. J.; Thomas, M.; Thomas, P.; Thorne, K. A.; Toland, K.; Torrie, C. I.; Traylor, G.; Urban, A. L.; Valdes, G.; Veitch, P. J.; Venkateswara, K.; Venugopalan, G.; Viets, A. D.; Vo, T.; Vorvick, C.; Wade, M.; Ward, R. L.; Warner, J.; Weaver, B.; Weiss, R.; Willke, B.; Wipf, C. C.; Xiao, L.; Yamamoto, H.; Zhang, L.; Zucker, M. E.; Zweizig, J.

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Abstract

The motion of a mechanical object, even a human-sized object, should be governed by the rules of quantum mechanics. Coaxing them into a quantum state is, however, difficult because the thermal environment masks any quantum signature of the object's motion. The thermal environment also masks the effects of proposed modifications of quantum mechanics at large mass scales. We prepared the center-of-mass motion of a 10-kilogram mechanical oscillator in a state with an average phonon occupation of 10.8. The reduction in temperature, from room temperature to 77 nanokelvin, is commensurate with an 11 orders-of-magnitude suppression of quantum back-action by feedback and a 13 orders-of-magnitude increase in the mass of an object prepared close to its motional ground state. Our approach will enable the possibility of probing gravity on massive quantum systems.

Additional Information

© 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 26 February 2021; accepted 5 May 2021. V.S. thanks V. Vuletić for useful conversations. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) LIGO Laboratory, which is a major facility fully funded by the NSF. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO, as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, and the Max-Planck-Society (MPS) for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors acknowledge the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Fellows program for additional support. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement no. PHY-1764464. Advanced LIGO was built under award no. PHY-0823459. E.D.H. is supported by the MathWorks, Inc. This manuscript is LIGO document no. LIGO-P2000525. The authors declare no competing interests. Author contributions: V.S., E.D.H., and N.M. conceived this project. C.W., E.D.H., S.D., and V.S. designed and implemented the modifications to the Advanced LIGO detector that enabled the experiment. All authors contributed to the running, diagnostics, and calibration of the detector. C.W., E.D.H., and V.S. analyzed the data. V.S. wrote the manuscript with help from E.D.H., C.W., and N.M. V.S. developed the theoretical models and supervised the project. Other LIGO collaboration authors contributed to the design, construction, and operation of Advanced LIGO and the development and maintenance of data handling, data reduction, and data analysis. All authors meet the journal's authorship criteria and have reviewed, discussed, and commented on the results and the manuscript. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions of this study are provided in the main text or the supplementary materials.

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Supplemental Material - abh2634-Whittle-SM.pdf

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