Towards the Laboratory Search for Space-Time Dissipation

Abstract

It has been speculated that gravity could be an emergent phenomenon, with classical general relativity as an effective, macroscopic theory, valid only for classical systems at large temporal and spatial scales. As in classical continuum dynamics, the existence of underlying microscopic degrees of freedom may lead to macroscopic dissipative behaviors. With the hope that such dissipative behaviors of gravity could be revealed by carefully designed experiments in the laboratory, we consider a phenomenological model that adds dissipations to the gravitational field, much similar to frictions in solids and fluids. Constraints to such dissipative behavior can already be imposed by astrophysical observations and existing experiments, but mostly in lower frequencies. We propose a series of experiments working in higher frequency regimes, which may potentially put more stringent bounds on these models.