Emergent gravity and ether-drift experiments

Abstract

According to several authors, gravity might be a long-wavelength phenomenon emerging in some 'hydrodynamic limit' from the same physical, flat-space vacuum viewed as a form of superfluid medium. In this framework, light might propagate in an effective acoustic geometry and exhibit a tiny anisotropy that could be measurable in the present ether-drift experiments. By accepting this view of the vacuum, one should also consider the possibility of sizeable random fluctuations of the signal that reflect the stochastic nature of the underlying `quantum ether' and could be erroneously interpreted as instrumental noise. To test the present interpretation, we have extracted the mean amplitude of the signal from various experiments with different systematics, operating both at room temperature and in the cryogenic regime. They all give the same consistent value < A > = O (10^{-15}) which is precisely the magnitude expected in an emergent-gravity approach, for an apparatus placed on the Earth's surface. Since physical implications could be substantial, it would be important to obtain more direct checks from the instantaneous raw data and, possibly, with new experimental set-ups operating in gravity-free environments.

21 pages, 1 table. Version accepted for publication in General Relativity and Gravitation.

References in corpus (7)

• Data Tables for Lorentz and CPT Violation
• Substructures in hydrodynamical cluster simulations
• Relativity tests by complementary rotating Michelson-Morley experiments
• Ultraweak excitations of the quantum vacuum as physical models of gravity
• Is the physical vacuum a preferred frame ?
• Precision tests with a new class of dedicated ether-drift experiments
• Towards a Quantum Fluid Mechanical Theory of Turbulence

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Cosmic Microwave Background and the issue of a fundamental preferred frame
• The CMB, preferred reference system and dragging of light in the earth frame
• Basic randomness of nature and ether-drift experiments
• Michelson-Morley Experiments: at the crossroads of Relativity, Cosmology and Quantum Physics
• Quantum Non-Locality and the CMB: what Experiments say