Detecting Gravitational Waves Using The Bose-Einstein Condensate

The current gravitational observatories aren’t really small. Yet detecting even the wildest collisions of the universe are barely detectable with them.

Nowadays we are finally sure that the most horrific collisions in of very massive bodies create gravitational waves as we have detected them. But the problem is that it is really hard to detect them as when they come to us they are really weak. So in reality we can only detect the most powerful of gravitational waves and even those test the very limits of our devices. And our devices are miles big.

But what if we tried something new? A German physicist Ralf Schützhold from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and engineers from the Technical University Dresden are looking into the possibility that we could use the amazing Bose-Einstein condensate and its quantum properties to detect gravitational waves.

It was Albert Einstein back in 1916 who said that the movement of massive objects create gravitational waves that churn up spacetime itself. But their effects are so weak under normal conditions that even Einstein himself didn’t believe we will detect them. To give you an idea of how weak they are – Earth, moving in orbit around the Sun at the speed of about 30 kilometers per hour create gravitational waves with only about 300 watts output. That would barely power your vacuum cleaner.

This is the reason why we detected only the gravitational waves created by collisions of black holes, neutron stars and similarly massive objects. But even with these, we need miles long observatories in which the gravitational wave will be detected by a laser changing its length by a billionth of a milimeter.

It would be great if we could use smaller detectors. And this where Bose-Einstein condensate may come into play. The atoms of this incredible matter move in sync and when a powerful gravitational wave passes through it fonons (quasi-particles) that carry vibrational quanta could be affected. Similarly to how waves in a large water tank are disrupted during an earthquake.

So, could we use small and precise gravitational wave detectors? Well, not yet. The amount of the condensate we would need is several times larger than what we have available at this time. Nowadays, scientists are happy if they create Bose-Einstein condensate composed of one million supercooled rubidium atoms. But for a realistic chance at detecting gravitational waves, we would need million times more. But not all hope is lost. The scientists say maybe we don’t need pure Bose-Einstein condensate.

When you cool helium to less than two degrees above absolute zero super-liquid helium gets created. There is less than ten percent synced atoms of helium in it that behave the same way as Bose-Einstein condensate does. But on the other hand, we are capable of creating much more super-liquid helium than pure Bose-Einstein condensate. And a large amount of super-liquid helium will have a large amount of synchronized atoms. But more work needs to be done to see whether that will be usable to detect gravitational waves.

Sources:

• https://www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pOid=57313&pNid=0
• https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.105019

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