Holometer

The Fermilab Holometer is under construction befindliches laser interferometer of the Fermilab in Illinois. It is to be the world's most sensitive laser interferometer and thus surpass the sensitivity of GEO600 and LIGO experiments. Theoretically, ranging from its sensitivity to detect holographic fluctuations of spacetime.

According to the project manager that the Holometer should be so sensitive that it could detect fluctuations of light on the order of a Attometers. To reach or meet it, the sensitivity which is necessary in the area of the smallest size units of the universe, to measure the so-called Planck units. The Fermilab explains: "Everyone knows now blurry and pixelated images or sound broadcasts full of noise that are associated with low bandwidth on the internet. The Holometer looking for the equivalent noise or disturbances in reality itself, which can be associated with the ultimate frequency limit, which specifies the nature itself. "

Craig Hogan, an astroparticle physicist at Fermilab, talks about the experiment, "What we are looking for, we hope to find when the laser come out of the same mode. We try the smallest unit in the universe to explore. It is so much fun, it 's a kind of old-fashioned physics experiment where you can not just do what comes out at the end. "

The experimental physicist Hartmut Grote from the Max Planck Institute explains that - even if he was skeptical that the apparatus is the holographic fluctuations of the universe to discover the location - if the experiment is successful, it would have " a very strong influence on a of the most important open questions in fundamental physics. It would be the first evidence that the space-time, the foundation of the universe is quantized ". "

The hypothesis that in this way the holographic noise could be observed was criticized for not having the necessary theoretical foundations violate the Lorentz invariance. Violation of the Lorentz transformation is, however, now severely limited, an aspect which is due to the lack of mathematical treatment.

The experiment

The Holometer will consist of two (power - recycling mirror) Michelson interferometers, similar to the instruments of the LIGO experiment. The interferometer will be able to work in two spatial configurations, which are called nested and back-to -back. According to Hogan's hypothesis, the beam splitter of the interferometer should be nested configuration seem to walk together in step sideways ( the shift should therefore be correlated ), while in the back-to -back configuration, the lateral displacement of the beam splitter independent, so it appears from one another uncorrelated. The presence or absence of the correlated displacement effect can be detected in each configuration by the cross- correlation of the output of the interferometer.

Accuracy

The predicted movements of the beam splitter to result from, where lp is the Planck length and L 40 meters ( the arm length of Holometer ) means at frequencies of a few megahertz. This is a movement of about 10 Attometer (10 × 10-18 meters) equivalent to one-third in microsecond and corresponds to an offset of approximately one millimeter per year, or about ten times slower than continental drift.