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Published on: March 19, 2011
Proposal for a quantum mechanical test of gravity at millimeter scale
Yu Cheng1,2, Jiadu Lin3,4, Jie Sheng3,4
1Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. chengyu@sjtu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
The experimental verification of the Newton law of gravity at small scales has been a longstanding challenge. Recently, torsion balance experiments have successfully measured gravitational force at the millimeter scale. However, testing gravity force on quantum mechanical wave function at small scales remains difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel experiment that utilizes the Josephson effect to detect the different evolution of quantum phase induced from the potential difference caused by gravity. We demonstrate that this experiment can test gravity quantum mechanically at the millimeter scale, and also has a potential to investigate the parity invariance of gravity at small scales.
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