Optomechanics with Superfluid Helium-4

Author: De Lorenzo, Laura Anne

Year: 2016

Degree: Dissertation (Ph.D.)

Advisor: Schwab, Keith C.

Committee Members: Schwab, Keith C.; Chen, Yanbei; Adhikari, Rana; Faraon, Andrei

Option: Applied Physics

DOI: 10.7907/Z9RJ4GD7

Abstract

We demonstrate the utility of superfluid helium-4 as an extremely low loss optomechanical element. We form an optomechanical system with a cylindrical niobium superconducting TE011 resonator whose 40 cm3 inner cylindrical cavity is filled with 4He. [1] Coupling is realized via the variations in permittivity resulting from the density profile of the acoustic modes. Acoustic losses in helium-4 below 500 mK are governed by the intrinsic nonlinearity of sound, leading to an attenuation which drops as T 4, indicating the possibility of quality factors (Q) over 1010 at 10 mK. In our lowest loss mode, we demonstrate this T 4 law down to 50 mK, realizing an acoustic Q of 1.35·108 at 8.1 kHz. When coupled with a low phase noise microwave source, we expect this system to be utilized as a probe of macroscopic quantized motion, for precision measurements to search for fundamental physical length scales, and as a continuous gravitational wave detector. Our estimates suggest that a resonant superfluid acoustic system could exceed the sensitivity of current broad-band detectors for narrow-band sources such as pulsars [2].

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