Description
The Atom Interferometer Observatory and Network (AION) project aims to develop a next-generation differential atom interferometer for the detection of ultra-light dark matter and mid-frequency range gravitational waves, complementing the peak sensitivities of other experiments i.e., LISA, LIGO, and Virgo. The project is comprised of various stages, starting with a 10 m baseline atom interferometer paving the way to a 100 m detector and eventually a km-scale terrestrial detector with the final stage being the development of a satellite-based detector. The project is a multidisciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from seven institutions from all over the UK. In this work, I present the role of my team at Imperial College London in this collaboration which is to improve the sensitivity of the detector by performing spin-squeezing on the atoms. Spin squeezing involves the entanglement of many atoms to reduce the spin measurement noise (which obeys Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) in one direction (i.e. Jy) while increasing the noise in the other direction (i.e. Jz) and allows measurements below the standard quantum limit. As a consequence, the resolution of the interferometer increases as the noise in the differential phase measurement is reduced.
