Spin Entanglement Witness for Quantum Gravity.

By Sougato Bose, Anupam Mazumdar, Gavin W. Morley, Hendrik Ulbricht, M. Toroš, Mauro Paternostro, A. Geraci, P. Barker, M. Kim, Gerard J. Milburn. Physical Review Letters, 2017

733 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding gravity in the framework of quantum mechanics is one of the great challenges in modern physics. However, the lack of empirical evidence has lead to a debate on whether gravity is a quantum entity. Despite varied proposed probes for quantum gravity, it is fair to say that there are no feasible ideas yet to test its quantum coherent behavior directly in a laboratory experiment. Here, we introduce an idea for such a test based on the principle that two objects cannot be entangled without a quantum mediator. We show that despite the weakness of gravity, the phase evolution induced by the gravitational interaction of two micron size test masses in adjacent matter-wave interferometers can detectably entangle them even when they are placed far apart enough to keep Casimir-Polder forces at bay. We provide a prescription for witnessing this entanglement, which certifies gravity as a quantum coherent mediator, through simple spin correlation measurements.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e50b0d3eecb0dc029557401c68364c11aac6c48b

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Tabletop experiments for quantum gravity: a user’s manual (2018, methodology): “This concept has driven significant physical and philosophical interest, and experimental proposals have begun to appear [7, 8] based on earlier suggestions [9–11].”
On the possibility of laboratory evidence for quantum superposition of geometries (2018, methodology): “It was pointed out in [1] that it may soon be possible to”