A fifty-fold improvement of thermal noise limited inertial sensitivity by operating at cryogenic temperatures

Abstract

A vacuum compatible cryogenic accelerometer is presented which will reach $<0.5$ p$g$ Hz${}^{-1/2}$ sensitivity from 1 mHz to 10 Hz with a maximum sensitivity of 10 f$g$ Hz${}^{-1/2}$ around 10 Hz. This figure can be translated to a displacement sensitivity $<2$ fm Hz${}^{-1/2}$ between 2 - 100~Hz. This will supersede the best obtained sensitivity of any motion sensor by more than three orders of magnitude at 1~Hz. The improvement is of interest to the fields of gravitational wave instrumentation, geophysics, accelerator physics and gravitation. In current particle accelerators and proposed future gravitational wave detectors $<$10 K cryogenics are applied to the test masses in order to reduce thermal noise. This concept can benefit from the already present superconducting regime temperatures and reach a $>10^5$ signal-to-noise ratio of all terrestrial seismic spectra. The sensor may be used for control of beam-focusing cryogenic electromagnets in particle accelerators, cryogenic inertial sensing for future gravitational wave detectors and other fields.

arXiv commentFigure 2 updated to correct version

References in corpus (7)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• Interferometer design of the KAGRA gravitational wave detector
• A high-precision mechanical absolute-rotation sensor
• Huddle test measurement of a near Johnson noise limited geophone

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Lunar Gravitational-Wave Antenna
• Gravitational-wave physics with Cosmic Explorer: limits to low-frequency sensitivity
• The payload of the Lunar Gravitational-wave Antenna
• A laser interferometer accelerometer for vibration sensitive cryogenic experiments