Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 233
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-60069-8

Regular Article

Influence of separating distance between atomic sensors for gravitational wave detection

¹ State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonances and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, P.R. China
² School of Mathematics and Physics, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, P.R. China

^a e-mail: zhangbc@wipm.ac.cn

Received: 3 February 2015
Received in final form: 26 July 2015
Published online: 13 October 2015

Abstract

We consider a recent scheme of gravitational wave detection using atomic interferometers as inertial sensors, and reinvestigate its configuration using the concept of sensitivity functions. We show that such configuration can suppress noise without influencing the gravitational wave signal. But the suppression is insufficient for the direct observation of gravitational wave signals, so we analyse the behaviour of the different noises influencing the detection scheme. As a novel method, we study the relations between the measurement sensitivity and the distance between two interferometers, and find that the results derived from vibration noise and laser frequency noise are in stark contrast to that derived from the shot noise, which is significant for the configuration design of gravitational wave detectors using atomic interferometers.