Hamburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 5: Symposium Quantentheorie und Gravitation

AGPhil 5.1: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 2. März 2016, 13:30–14:10, VMP4 Audimax 1

Quantum Tests of Gravity — •Markus Aspelmeyer — University of Vienna, Faculty of Physics, Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ), Vienna, Austria

The early pioneering experiment by Colella, Overhauser and Werner demonstrates the effect of Earth's gravitational potential on quantum interference fringes in a neutron interferometer. It was the first experiment that required the use of both Planck's constant and Newton's constant to describe the observed fringe pattern. Over the following decades, the development of new tools significantly expanded the available quantum experiments that test the effects of weak gravitational fields, including atom interferometers, gravitationally bound states of neutrons or atomic clock tests of the gravitational red shift. The last few years have seen a renewed interest and a significant increase of experiments and experimental proposals to explore the interface between quantum physics and gravity. Quantum optics and cold atom experiments have been pushing the sensitivity of measurements of space and time to unprecedented regimes. Recent proposals even suggest that table-top experiments may allow to falsify low-energy consequences of quantum theories of gravity. On the other hand, the fast progress in macroscopic quantum experiments may soon allow to study quantum superposition states involving clocks or of increasingly massive objects, opening up a completely new regime of experiments in which the source mass character of the quantum system starts to play a role. I will review the current state of the art and discuss some of the challenges and prospects for such quantum tests of (quantum) gravity.