Commercial Accelerometers for Vibration Sensing at mK Temperatures in Dry Dilution Refrigerators

TL;DR

This study evaluates commercial accelerometers for vibration sensing at millikelvin temperatures in dry dilution refrigerators, enabling real-time vibration monitoring crucial for sensitive experiments in physics and quantum sciences.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of using off-the-shelf accelerometers at mK temperatures and provides initial radioassay results, advancing vibration monitoring in cryogenic environments.

Findings

Accelerometers function effectively at 8 mK temperatures.

Real-time vibration monitoring is achievable in dry dilution refrigerators.

Commercial accelerometers can be integrated into cryogenic systems for stability analysis.

Abstract

This article presents an evaluation of off-the-shelf commercial accelerometers at the mixing chamber stage of a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator at temperatures down to 8 mK. In addition, we present results of radioassay of accelerometer samples using a high purity germanium detector counting setup. Cryogen-free dilution refrigerators using pulse-tube cryocoolers (PTs)-due to recent advances in their cooling capacity, long-term stability, and operational costs-have become ubiquitous tools in a wide range of fields ranging from experimental particle physics to quantum information sciences. However, vibrations induced by PTs can negatively impact the experimental payload in these applications. This work demonstrates that commercially available accelerometers can not only measure vibrations at millikelvin cryogenic temperatures but also pave the way for continuous, in situ, real-time vibration monitoring of dry dilution refrigerators.