EPJ Quantum Technol. (2016) 3: 8
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-016-0046-4

Letter

Thermal noise in BEC-phononic gravitational wave detectors

¹ Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC, Serrano 113-bis, Madrid, 28006, Spain
² School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
³ Racah Institute of Physics and Quantum Information Science Centre, Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel
⁴ Department of Physics, York Centre for Quantum Technologies, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK
⁵ Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Boltzmanngasse 5, Wien, 1090, Austria

^* e-mail: csl@iff.csic.es

Received: 15 January 2016
Accepted: 11 May 2016
Published online: 20 May 2016

Abstract

Quasiparticles in a Bose-Einstein condensate are sensitive to space-time distortions. Gravitational waves can induce transformations on the state of phonons that can be observed through quantum state discrimination techniques. We show that this method is highly robust to thermal noise and depletion. We derive a bound on the strain sensitivity that shows that the detection of waves in the kHz regime is not significantly affected by temperature in a wide range of parameters that are well within current experimental reach.