Heidelberg 2015 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 33: Quantum Optics IV
Q 33.5: Talk
Wednesday, March 25, 2015, 12:00–12:15, B/gHS
Gravitational and special-relativistic effects on x-ray superradiance — Wen-Te Liao1,2,3 and •Sven Ahrens1,4 — 1Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, 01187 Dresden, Germany — 3Center for Free Electron Laser Science, 22607 Hamburg, Germany — 4Beijing Computational Science Research Center, Beijing, China
Time is running at different speed in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This property has been proven with atomic clock experiments and Mösbauer spectroscopy in the past.
A nuclear crystal forms a dense array of micro clocks, in which the inhomogeneous evolution of time can be probed. To do so, we propose to excite the two-level systems of nuclear transitions with x-ray photons. The phase fronts of absorbed photons are stored as collective nuclear excitation in the crystal. These phase fronts are subject to inhomogeneous time evolution in the gravitational field. Thus, we predict, that the reemitted superradiant photon is deflected by gravity while it is stored in the crystal. This is a general effect, which always appears in every quantum system of sufficiently low decoherence.
We consider the deflection of photons, which interact with a nuclear crystal in the earth gravitational field by analytically solving the combined quantum system of the photon and the nuclear ensemble in our contribution [1]. In order to enhance the deflection effect, we also consider a fast rotating setup with high centripetal acceleration.
W.-T. Liao and S. Ahrens, arXiv:1411.7634 (2014)