No Arabic abstract
Good clocks are of importance both to fundamental physics and for applications in astronomy, metrology and global positioning systems. In a recent technological breakthrough, researchers at NIST have been able to achieve a stability of 1 part in $10^{18}$ using an Ytterbium clock. This naturally raises the question of whether there are fundamental limits to the stability of clocks. In this paper we point out that gravity and quantum mechanics set a fundamental limit on the stability of clocks. This limit comes from a combination of the uncertainty relation, the gravitational redshift and the relativistic time dilation effect. For example, a single ion hydrogen maser clock in a terrestrial gravitational field cannot achieve a stability better than one part in $10^{22}$. This observation has implications for laboratory experiments involving both gravity and quantum theory.
We address the problem of estimating the mass of a quantum particle in a gravitational field and seek the ultimate bounds to precision of quantum-limited detection schemes. In particular, we study the effect of the field on the achievable sensitivity and address the question of whether quantumness of the probe state may provide a precision enhancement. The ultimate bounds to precision are quantified in terms of the corresponding Quantum Fisher Information. Our results show that states with no classical limit perform better than semiclassical ones and that a non-trivial interplay exists between the external field and the statistical model. More intense fields generally lead to a better precision, with the exception of position measurements in the case of freely-falling systems.
The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and technological opportunities. In particular, an earth-orbiting satellite containing an ensemble of optical clocks would allow a precision measurement of the gravitational redshift, navigation with improved precision, mapping of the earths gravitational potential by relativistic geodesy, and comparisons between ground clocks.
A recent proposal describes space based gravitational wave (GW) detection with optical lattice atomic clocks [Kolkowitz et. al., Phys. Rev. D 94, 124043 (2016)] [1]. Based on their setup, we propose a new measurement method for gravitational wave detection in low frequency with optical lattice atomic clocks. In our method, n successive Doppler signals are collected and the summation for all these signals is made to improve the sensitivity of the low-frequency GW detection. In particular, the improvement is adjustable by the number of Doppler signals, which is equivalent to that the length between two atomic clocks is increased. Thus, the same sensitivity can be reached but with shorter distance, even though the acceleration noises lead to failing to achieve the anticipated improvement below the inflection point of frequency which is determined by the quantum projection noise. Our result is timely for the ongoing development of space-born observatories aimed at studying physical and astrophysical effects associated with low-frequency GW.
Gravitational wave detectors (GWDs), which have brought about a new era in astronomy, have reached such a level of maturity that further improvement necessitates quantum-noise-evading techniques. Numerous proposals to this end have been discussed in the literature, e.g., invoking frequency-dependent squeezing or replacing the current Michelson interferometer topology by that of the quantum speedmeter. Recently, a proposal based on the linking of a standard interferometer to a negative-mass spin system via entangled light has offered an unintrusive and small-scale new approach to quantum noise evasion in GWDs [Phys. Rev. Lett. $mathbf{121}$, 031101 (2018)]. The solution proposed therein does not require modifications to the highly refined core optics of the present GWD design and, when compared to previous proposals, is less prone to losses and imperfections of the interferometer. In the present article, we refine this scheme to an extent that the requirements on the auxiliary spin system are feasible with state-of-the-art implementations. This is accomplished by matching the effective (rather than intrinsic) susceptibilities of the interferometer and spin system using the virtual rigidity concept, which, in terms of implementation, requires only suitable choices of the various homodyne, probe, and squeezing phases.
The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is analyzed for photons in a modified Mach-Zehnder setup with two particles experiencing different gravitational potentials, which are later recombined using a beam-splitter. It is found that the HOM effect depends directly on the relativistic time dilation between the arms of the setup. This temporal dilation can be used to estimate the $gamma$ and $beta$ parameters of the parameterized post-Newtonian formalism. The uncertainty in the parameters $gamma$ and $beta$ are of the order $ 10^{-8}-10^{-12}$, depending on the quantum state employed.