Signatures of the Quantization of Gravity at Gravitational Wave Detectors

Understand

We develop a formalism to calculate the response of a model gravitational wave detector to a quantized gravitational field.

• Coupling a detector to a quantum field induces stochastic fluctuations ("noise") in the length of the detector arm.
• The statistical properties of this noise depend on the choice of quantum state of the gravitational field.
• We characterize the noise for vacuum, coherent, thermal, and squeezed states.