Could Energy Decoherence due to Quantum Gravity be observed?

Abstract

It has recently been proposed that quantum gravity might lead to the decoherence of superpositions in energy, corresponding to a discretization of time at the Planck scale. At first sight the proposal seems amenable to experimental verification with methods from quantum optics and atomic physics. However, we argue that the predicted decoherence is unobservable in such experiments if it acts globally on the whole experimental setup. This is related to the unobservability of the global phase in interference. We also show how local energy decoherence, which acts separately on system and phase reference, could be detected with remarkable sensitivity and over a wide range of length scales by long-distance Ramsey interferometry with metastable atomic states. The sensitivity of the experiments can be further enhanced using multi-atom entanglement.

7 pages, no figures

References in corpus (6)

• Tuning the scattering length with an optically induced Feshbach resonance
• Decoherence of matter waves by thermal emission of radiation
• Spectroscopy of the ${}^1{S}_0-{}^3{P}_0$ Clock Transition of ${}^{87}$Sr in an Optical Lattice
• Precision frequency measurement of visible intercombination lines of strontium
• Lifetime measurement of the ^3P_2 metastable state of strontium atoms
• Problems and Aspects of Energy-Driven Wavefunction Collapse Models

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Quantum Spacetime Phenomenology
• Testing gravity with cold atom interferometry: Results and prospects
• Fundamental decoherence from quantum gravity: a pedagogical review
• Relational physics with real rods and clocks and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics
• Characterizations and Quantifications of Macroscopic Quantumness and Its Implementations using Optical Fields
• Large Energy Superpositions via Rydberg Dressing
• Creating and detecting micro-macro photon-number entanglement by amplifying and de-amplifying a single-photon entangled state
• Fundamental spatiotemporal decoherence: a key to solving the conceptual problems of black holes, cosmology and quantum mechanics
• Bounding quantum gravity inspired decoherence using atom interferometry
• Detection of Gravitational Wave - An Application of Relativistic Quantum Information Theory
• Quantum cosmic censor: gravitation makes reality undecidable
• Can the study of reduction probabilities reveal news about the nature of quantum state reduction?