Feature
Squeezing on a Chip
Bulk optics gives us light beyond the quantum limit, but integrated photonics promises an extended reach—from biological imaging to quantum computing.
The squeezed light source in LIGO’s vacuum chamber. [W. Jia / MIT]
Everything about the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) seems big. The US$600 million facility consists of two L-shaped vacuum tubes with arms 4 km long, located at sites on opposite ends of the United States. Laser beams with a whopping 350 kW of power are sent along these tubes and bounce back and forth off mirrors weighing 40 kg each before interfering at a detector—all in the name of measuring sub-proton-scale changes in distance, imprinted within the interference pattern and brought about by gravitational waves emanating from cataclysmic processes in the far-off universe.
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