Temperature and Thermal Noise Suppression for Precision Mechanical Experiments

There is currently a lack of experiments that would prove whether gravity exists as a quantum field. One possible proof of the quantum nature of gravity would be to entangle massive quantum harmonic oscillators. This quantum harmonic oscillator acts as a resonant sensor for the entanglement with gravity. The quality factor of a resonant sensor must be sufficiently high such that the sensor is not dominated by thermal noise and the sensor can be cooled to the ground state. This thesis creates scaling laws for the interaction between the mass size bonded to a membrane resonator and the resonator's quality factor. With such a resonator, the entanglement is anticipated to be weak and requires extensive averaging to achieve statistically significant measurements. As such, the creation of a long time stable environment is critical. Thus, the lab temperature where the experiment will be run was stabilized to an integrated deviation of 20mK from 1K. This resulted in a reduction of laser position noise by a factor of 2.7x.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Fife, Dylan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sudhir, Vivishek

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151896

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151896