The
Fermilab Holometer in
Illinois is intended to be the world's most sensitive laser
interferometer
Interferometry is a technique which uses the ''interference'' of superimposed waves to extract information. Interferometry typically uses electromagnetic waves and is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy, fiber op ...
, surpassing the sensitivity of the
GEO600
GEO600 is a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, a town 20 km to the south of Hanover, Germany. It is designed and operated by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Opti ...
and
LIGO systems, and theoretically able to detect
holographic fluctuations in
spacetime.
According to the director of the project, the Holometer should be capable of detecting fluctuations in the light of a single
attometer
The following are examples of orders of magnitude for different lengths.
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Overview
Detailed list
To help compare different orders of magnitude, the following list describes various lengths between 1.6 \times 10^ metres and 10 ...
, meeting or exceeding the sensitivity required to detect the smallest units in the
universe called
Planck units.
Fermilab states: "Everyone is familiar these days with the blurry and
pixelated images, or noisy sound transmission, associated with poor internet bandwidth. The Holometer seeks to detect the equivalent blurriness or noise in reality itself, associated with the ultimate
frequency limit imposed by nature."
, a
particle astrophysicist at Fermilab, states about the experiment, "What we’re looking for is when the lasers lose step with each other. We’re trying to detect the smallest unit in the universe. This is really great fun, a sort of old-fashioned
physics experiment where you don’t know what the result will be."
Experimental physicist Hartmut Grote of the