Comparison of LISA and Atom Interferometry for Gravitational Wave Astronomy in Space

TL;DR

This paper compares space-based atom interferometry and laser interferometry for gravitational wave detection, analyzing sensitivity, technical challenges, and feasibility of proposed missions like AGIS-Sat and AGIS-LEO.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the technical requirements and challenges for atom interferometer gravitational wave missions, highlighting stability constraints and feasibility issues.

Findings

Atom interferometers can achieve sensitivity comparable to LISA in certain frequency ranges.

Wavefront aberration stability requirements are extremely tight, around 1×10^-8 wavelengths.

Earth-orbiting atom interferometer missions face significant technical and design challenges.

Abstract

One of the atom interferometer gravitational wave missions proposed by Dimopoulos et al.1 in 2008 was called AGIS-Sat. 2. It had a suggested gravitational wave sensitivity set by the atom state detection shot noise level that started at 1 mHz, was comparable to LISA sensitivity from 1 to about 20 mHz, and had better sensitivity from 20 to 500 mHz. The separation between the spacecraft was 1,000 km, with atom interferometers 200 m long and shades from sunlight used at each end. A careful analysis of many error sources was included, but requirements on the time-stability of both the laser wavefront aberrations and the atom temperatures in the atom clouds were not investigated. After including these considerations, the laser wavefront aberration stability requirement to meet the quoted sensitivity level is about 1\times10-8 wavelengths, and is far tighter than for LISA. Also, the temperature fluctuations between atom clouds have to be less than 1 pK. An alternate atom interferometer GW mission in Earth orbit called AGIS-LEO with 30 km satellite separation has been suggested recently. The reduction of wavefront aberration noise by sending the laser beam through a high-finesse mode-scrubbing optical cavity is discussed briefly, but the requirements on such a cavity are not given. Unfortunately, such an Earth-orbiting mission seems to be considerably more difficult to design than a non-geocentric mission and does not appear to have comparably attractive scientific goals.