Can Gravitons be Detected?

By T. Rothman, S. Boughn. 2006

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the literature dealing with graviton detection and production.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58db1e07537c5877630e1d9304c67aff4160019b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

How higher-spin gravity surpasses the spin-two barrier (2010, background): “(13)A thorough discussion on the observability of the graviton is presented in [50, 51].”
Tabletop experiments for quantum gravity: a user’s manual (2018, methodology): “Beyond this order-of-magnitude estimate, we refer the reader to detailed calculations of spontaneous emission in a neutron quantum bouncer [69], simple harmonic oscillator [67], and especially the wonderful review of the 3d→ 1s transition in hydrogen presented in [63,64].”