News

Yesterday, the second of two meetings aimed to involve the scientific community and to prepare for the upcoming CDF study was successfully concluded. In particular, there was a meeting in Bratislava on March 20-22, which focused on the theoretical aspects of performing tests of quantum physics, and there was a follow-up meeting on April 10-11 on the experimental challenges we face in such endeavors as well as the state-of-the-art experimental efforts on ground.

Following the meeting at Trento in June 2017, R. Kaltenbaek met at the end of June 2017 with ESA at ESTEC in the Netherlands to discuss the further proceeding. It was agreed that there would be an ESA study of MAQRO at the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) of ESA within the first half of 2018. To this end, we assembled a core team to work on MAQRO. For now, the team was agreed to have the following structure:

Principal Investigator: Rainer ...

MAQRO, along with three other proposals, has been identified in line with the spirit of ESA’s call for New Science Ideas to be investigated more closely in collaboration with the community. In particular, there will be a meeting of the lead proposers of the four New Ideas identified and representatives of ESA in Trento, Italy, from June 6-7.

We submitted MAQRO as a proposal to ESA’s call for New Science Ideas. If we are successful, this will allow us to discuss MAQRO with ESA in order to better identify critical issues and a technology roadmap towards a potential future implementation of MAQRO. We decided to submit a proposal in this form rather than submitting a proposal for the "M5" call in order to better prepare for an anticipated future "M6" call, which will ...

The article "Thermal performance of a radiatively cooled system for quantum optomechanical experiments in space" by A. Pilan Zanoni, J. Burkhardt, U. Johann, M. Aspelmeyer, R. Kaltenbaek, and G. Hechenblaikner just got published (Applied Thermal Engineering 107, 689 (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2016.06.116). The image above is the corresponding graphical abstract.

(by Rainer Kaltenbaek, 2016)

The updated form of the MAQRO mission proposal, which we submitted last year in response to the “M4” Cosmic Vision call of ESA, finally was published today as a review in EPJ Quantum Technology.

The image was designed and rendered using Blender for the start of the COST action QTSpace, which MAQRO ...

On July 20th, 2015, ESA announced plans for issuing an M5 call in the near future. Of course, we plan to submit our MAQRO proposal once again. As described in the announcement, we should state our interest by September 20th, 2015. This is not necessary but it will show ESA what they can expect in terms of proposals submitted. The tentative schedule is: call announced in December 2015, deadline for submission: April 2016.

We adapted the MAQRO M4 proposal to paper form for future publication and uploaded it to the arXiv.

We received the news from ESA today that MAQRO has not been selected for the shortlist of candidate mission proposals that will be investigated in more detail. This is not completely unexpected given the amount of technological development we still have to perform and the tight time frame of ESA for the M4 mission.

Nevertheless, we have made impressive progress in the course of preparing the M4 mission proposal – we addressed many technical issues that were yet unresolved in our ...