Squeezed Light: Breaking the Quantum Limit

Documentary Film

Runtime 36:00

Les Guthman, USA

“Squeezed Light: Breaking the Quantum Limit” is the inside, first-person chronicle of the Nobel Prize winning LIGO Scientific Collaboration’s stunning breakthrough last year in quantum physics.

It is a seminal development in quantum physics, but we believe the documentary, If not overtly political, also is a powerful contribution to answering the present war on women and people of color, and more frontally, the war on science.

From Pakistani physicist Nergis Mavalava, now dean of science at MIT, to young Chinese physicist Haocun Yu; from two Chinese American physicists Victoria XU and Maggie Tse, to two Italian leaders of the LIGO squeezed light project, Alessandra Buonanno and Lisa Barsotti, our film features their first-person accounts of this cutting-edge quantum breakthrough. Mavalvala is a MacArthur Fellow and Buonanno is director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany (and a professor at the University of Maryland).

“Squeezed Light” is about the long quest to harness quantum squeezed light to achieve the most precise measurements ever made -- more precise than the cosmic discovery, but quantum measurement, of LIGO’s discovery ten years ago that was comparable to seeing one strand of hair on the nearest star 23 trillion miles away. It’s a breakthrough that resonates throughout quantum science and quantum computing.

Eight years in production, “Squeezed Light” tells the story of how, over a 50-year chronicle, LIGO perfected the quantum theory and technology to surpass the long-predicted Quantum Limit to its ability to measure the most distant gravitational waves in the universe.

We have been filming with Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for ten years, documenting (and witnessing on film) their amazing discoveries and advances in astronomy and astrophysics, along with quantum physics. In our first documentary with Caltech and MIT, "LIGO" (2019) we were, by great good fortune, on location at LIGO’s Livingston Observatory outside of Baton Rouge, LA on the day they made the historic first detection of colliding black holes and their gravitational waves, a discovery which earned them the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics (whose sublime week in Stockholm was our final shoot for "LIGO!")

“LIGO,” is distributed on our Advanced LIGO Documentary Project’s YouTube channel (900,000 views and counting, now with 60,000 views a month), as does our nine-part web series, “THE DISCOVERY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.” Our productions are funded by a National Science Foundation grant in 2016, grants from Caltech and MIT, and significant support from the company MathWorks.

The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project is a collaboration between our company XPLR Productions and Caltech, based in New York and Los Angeles.