snorkack said:
My issue is - can you use classical general relativity to prove that Ligo does not alter gravitational waves at all
You should have asked this question in the OP of this thread. Fortunately we've only had to spend 9 posts finding out what your actual question was; but that's still 9 posts that could have been spent discussing your actual question instead of wandering around trying to figure out what it was.
As far as I know the so-called "claim" that gravitational wave detectors like LIGO extract exactly zero energy from the waves was never actually claimed by anyone. The only claim that was actually made was that the amount of energy extracted by the detector would be small enough, compared to the total energy carried by the wave, that it could be ignored in the theoretical analysis of the detector. The paper you referenced is simply trying to investigate in more detail the magnitude of the actual energy extracted and the mechanism by which it is extracted.
snorkack said:
or by far less than hω, and therefore any as yet unknown quantum theory of gravity must make an exception into Heisenberg uncertainty for Ligo?
This does not follow.
First, the paper you referenced is
not analyzing any quantum aspects of gravitational waves. It is analyzing quantum aspects of the light in the interferometer, whose interference effects are used to characterize the gravitational waves detected. It has been known since the original design of LIGO that quantum effects on the light would be significant and would need to be allowed for. This paper appears to me to be analyzing the effects of the light on the motion of the mirrors, and then assuming that such effects on the motion of the mirrors correspond to effects on the amount of energy absorbed by the detector from the gravitational wave being detected. This latter assumption, as far as I can tell, is simply hand-waving.
Second, it is not the case that any gravitational wave detector must, at sufficiently low intensity, detect single gravitons, just as it is not the case that any electromagnetic wave detector must, at sufficiently low intensity, detect single photons. For example, consider an ordinary antenna. The state of the EM field that the antenna is detecting is a coherent state, which is not an eigenstate of photon number, and the observable the antenna is detecting is not photon number; roughly speaking it is detecting the amplitude of the coherent state as a function of time. Similarly, LIGO is not a "graviton number" detector; roughly speaking, the gravitational wave it is detecting is a coherent state, and LIGO is detecting the amplitude of the coherent state as a function of time. These observables do not become "single quantum" detections at low intensity.