Kavli Affiliate: Lee McCuller | Summary:Thermal noise in optics constrains the precision of optical experiments, including Michelson interferometers, optical clocks, and optomechanical sensors. While high-power optical experiments such as gravitational-wave detectors are currently limited mainly by quantum noise, new experiments incorporating recent insights from quantum metrology are being developed that evade the quantum shot noise […]

Kavli Affiliate: Lee McCuller | Summary:New experiments are being developed without the background of quantum shot noise to look for weak, high-frequency signals using Michelson interferometers. Since shot noise is no longer the dominant noise source with these readout schemes, it is important to accurately model thermal noise to characterize signals and design more sensitive […]

Kavli Affiliate: Lee McCuller | Summary:We present a bidirectional internal squeezing scheme for gravitational-wave detectors and show that it saturates the lowest known lower bounds on quantum noise from internal optical dissipation. The scheme uses two optical parametric amplification stages inside the signal-extraction cavity that act on intra-cavity fields propagating in opposite directions. Thereby, most […]