Snowmass 2021 White Paper: Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity

Abstract

This short review is intended as a colloquium-level summary, for the Snowmass 2021 process, on recent theoretical results on infrared observables in quantum gravity. We rely on simple physical arguments, most notably a random walk intuition, to show how effects of quantum gravity in the ultraviolet (at the Planck length ℓₚ ≈ 10⁻³⁵ m) may integrate into the infrared when the large measurement length scale L enters into the observable. A quantum uncertainty at lightsheet horizons would give rise to an accumulated effect of size δL² ≃ ℓₚL/4π. We discuss how the random walk intuition falls out from more formal calculations, such as from AdS/CFT, from the dimensional reduction of the Einstein-Hilbert action to dilaton gravity, from multiple gravitational shockwaves generated by vacuum energy fluctuations, as well as from an effective description of gravity as a fluid. We overview experimental prospects for measuring this effect with a simple Michelson interferometer utilizing many of the tools developed for gravitational wave observatories.