Probing Spontaneous Wave-Function Collapse with Entangled Levitating Nanospheres

Abstract

Wave function collapse models are considered as the modified theories of standard quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. By introducing nonlinear stochastic terms in the Schrödinger equation, these models make predictions, differently from those of standard quantum mechanics, that it is fundamentally impossible to prepare macroscopic systems in macroscopic superpositions. The validity of these models can only be examined by experiments and hence efficient protocols for this kind of experiments are highly needed. Here we provide a protocol that is able to probe the postulated collapse effect by means of the entanglement of the center-of-mass motion of two nanospheres optically trapped in a Fabry-Pérot cavity. We show that the collapse noise results in large reduction of the steady-state entanglement and the entanglement, with and without the collapse effect, shows distinguishable scalings with certain system parameters, which can be used to unambiguously determine the effect of these models.

slightly extended. To appear in PRA

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Auxiliary-cavity-assisted ground-state cooling of optically levitated nanosphere in the unresolved-sideband regime
• Enhanced entanglement of two optical modes in optomechanical systems via an optical parametric amplifier
• Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering and Bell nonlocality of two macroscopic mechanical oscillators in optomechanical systems