Thermal noise in BEC-phononic gravitational wave detectors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Bose-Einstein condensate phononic detectors can effectively sense gravitational waves in the kHz range, with robustness against thermal noise and depletion, offering a promising quantum sensing approach.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum state discrimination method for BEC phonons to detect gravitational waves, showing robustness against thermal noise and depletion effects.

Findings

Detection sensitivity is not significantly affected by temperature.

The method is robust within current experimental parameters.

Gravitational waves in the kHz regime can be detected using BEC phonons.

Abstract

Quasiparticles in a Bose-Einstein condensate are sensitive to space-time distortions. Gravitational waves can induce transformations on the state of phonons that can be observed through quantum state discrimination techniques. We show that this method is highly robust to thermal noise and depletion. We derive a bound on the strain sensitivity that shows that the detection of waves in the kHz regime is not significantly affected by temperature in a wide range of parameters that are well within current experimental reach.