Photon-Counting Interferometry to Detect Geontropic Space-Time Fluctuations with GQuEST
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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2.
Jet Propulsion Lab
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3.
Fermilab
Abstract
The gravity from the quantum entanglement of space-time (GQuEST) experiment uses tabletop-scale Michelson laser interferometers to probe for fluctuations in space-time. We present a practicable interferometer design featuring a novel photon-counting readout method that provides unprecedented sensitivity, as it is not subject to the interferometric standard quantum limit. We evaluate the potential of this design to measure space-time fluctuations motivated by recent "geontropic" quantum gravity models. The accelerated accrual of Fisher information offered by the photon-counting readout enables GQuEST to detect the predicted quantum gravity phenomena within measurement times at least 100 times shorter than equivalent conventional interferometers. The GQuEST design, thus, enables a fast and sensitive search for signatures of quantum gravity in a laboratory-scale experiment.
Copyright and License
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Acknowledgement
The authors thank H. Siegel and Y. Levin for constructive comments on a previous version of the manuscript, highlighting the additional contribution of substrate thermorefractive noise due to standing optical waves in the beam splitter, and correcting factors of 2 in our charge carrier noise power. S. M. V. thanks James W. Gardner for discussions on the theory of quantum measurement of stochastic signals. This article was prepared by the GQuEST Collaboration using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. The GQuEST project is funded in part by the Heising-Simons Foundation through Grant No. 2022-3341.
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Additional details
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- DE-AC02-07CH11359
- United States Department of Energy
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- 2022-3341
- Accepted
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2024-12-05Accepted
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Publication Status
- Published