A proposal for testing quantum gravity in the lab
By A. Ali, Saurya Das, E. Vagenas. 2011
343 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Attempts to formulate a quantum theory of gravitation are collectively known as quantum gravity. Various approaches to quantum gravity such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, as well as black hole physics and doubly special relativity theories predict a minimum measurable length, or a maximum observable momentum, and related modifications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to a so-called generalized uncertainty principle (GUP). We have proposed a GUP consistent with string theory, black hole physics, and doubly special relativity theories and have showed that this modifies all quantum mechanical Hamiltonians. When applied to an elementary particle, it suggests that the space that confines it must be quantized, and in fact that all measurable lengths are quantized in units of a fundamental length (which can be the Planck length). On the one hand, this may signal the breakdown of the spacetime continuum picture near that scale, and on the other hand, it can predict an upper bound on the quantum gravity parameter in the GUP, from current observations. Furthermore, such fundamental discreteness of space may have observable consequences at length scales much larger than the Planck scale. Because this influences all the quantum Hamiltonians in an universal way, it predicts quantum gravity corrections to various quantum phenomena. Therefore, in the present work we compute these corrections to the Lamb shift, simple harmonic oscillator, Landau levels, and the tunneling current in a scanning tunneling microscope.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/074c3e940da23869a079248b8b6e796b6c416c7b
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Abdel Nasser Tawfik
- A. Diab
- Myungshik S. Kim
- Č. Brukner
- I. Pikovski
- Markus Aspelmeyer
- Sabine Hossenfelder
- Lucien Hardy
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Minimal Length Scale Scenarios for Quantum Gravity (2012, background): “In this fashion, in the leading-order approximation, the harmonic oscillator in one dimension has been studied in [184, 167, 8, 125], the harmonic oscillator in arbitrary dimensions in [83, 177, 85, 93], the energy levels of the hydrogen atom in [167, 69, 296, 67, 258], the particle in a box in [7],”
- Probing Planck-scale physics with quantum optics (2011, methodology): “Note that this would improve the existing bounds for γ0 (16) by 10 orders of magnitude.”
- Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Approaches and Applications (2014, methodology): “The linear GUP approach assumes that the momentum of a particle with mass M having distant origin and an energy scale which is comparable to the Planck scale would be a subject of a tiny modification [63, 75, 113] so that the comoving momenta are pν = pν (1− α p0 + 2α(2) p(2)0) and p(2)ν = p(2)ν (1−”