Towards quantum gravity measurement by cold atoms

Abstract

We propose an experiment for the measurement of gravitational effect on cold atoms by applying a one-dimensional vertically sinusoidal oscillation to the magneto-optical trap; and observe the signature of low quantum energy shift of quantum bound states as a consequence of gravitational fluctuation. To this end, we present brief details of the experiment on a BEC, and a simplistic calculation of the Gross-Pitaevskii solution using Thomas-Fermi approximation with focus on the density of the BEC, for the time-dependent perturbation. Moreover, we calculate the power induced by quantum gravity on a generic atomic ensemble. We also address the possible challenges for the measurement of the expected results. And finally, we discuss the prospect of further developing this experiment towards measuring the effect of quantum spacetime fluctuations on cold atoms.

arXiv comment9 pages, to appear in the Journal of Plasma Physics

References in corpus (2)

• Theory of Bose-Einstein condensation in trapped gases
• Probing spacetime fluctuations using cold atom traps

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