…The research team at Cardiff University took a bold step toward understanding the quantum nature of gravity by setting new limits on the existence of very high-frequency gravitational waves…
“Our experiment is trying to answer the question of whether space-time is ‘quantized’,” Abhinav Patra, MSc, a doctoral student in the university’s Gravity Exploration Institute and lead author of the study, stated. “Modern physics treats space and time not as two separate things, but as a single physical entity.”
By correlating data from two independent interferometers, the team ruled out certain high-frequency gravitational waves that might be predicted by quantum theories of gravity.
This correlation method allowed them to isolate potential signals from random noise and effectively filter out local disturbances like seismic vibrations or thermal fluctuations…
The original paper is linked in the article:
https://doi.org/10.1103/61j9-cjkk
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/61j9-cjkk
The detector sensitivity seems to be quantified in “meters per sqrt(hertz)”, and is on the order of 10^(-20) m/√(Hz).
“Very high frequency” seems to be on the order of 200 MHz.
I read the article, really cool stuff. Keen to read more once they start operating, since this article seems to be about validating the instrument construction.