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Where is the Holometer?
The Holometer is located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
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Preparing the Laser Beams
The pre mode cleaner is an important part of the optics we use to prepare laser beams for interferometers
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The East Hut
Two of the end mirrors are in the east hut.
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Central Clean Room
Research Technician Ben Brubaker works on the beam splitter vacuum system.
Holometer
The Fermilab Holometer is a new kind of instrument designed to study the quantum character of space itself. It measures the quantum coherence of location with unprecedented precision.
Laser light passing through an arrangement of mirrors will show whether space stands still, or whether it always jitters by a tiny amount, carrying all matter with it, due to quantum-geometrical fluctuations. We call this new property of space time ``holographic'' noise.
The experiment will help us understand space and time better: what they are made of, and how they relate to matter and energy.
The experiment, also known as Fermilab E-990, has concluded data collection and analysis
Results
The paper documenting our first science results is now published in Physical Review Letters: First Measurements of High Frequency Cross-Spectra from a Pair of Large Michelson Interferometers.
An arXiv version can be found here.
There is also a Fermilab news article describing the result.
Interferometric Constraints on Quantum Geometrical Shear Noise Correlations (24 Mar 2017)
Interferometric Constraints on Spacelike Coherent Rotational Fluctuations (13 Dec 2020) describes results from the "bent-arm" configuration.
Random twists in space? Fermilab news article describing the result.
Data Management Principles
We describe our Data Management Principles for the Holometer.
Here is a CSV file containing the data used for the September 2016 Physical Review Letters results.
