Interferometer response to geontropic fluctuations
Abstract
We model vacuum fluctuations in quantum gravity with a scalar field, characterized by a high occupation number, coupled to the metric. The occupation number of the scalar is given by a thermal density matrix, whose form is motivated by fluctuations in the vacuum energy, which have been shown to be conformal near a light-sheet horizon. For the experimental measurement of interest in an interferometer, the size of the energy fluctuations is fixed by the area of a surface bounding the volume of spacetime being interrogated by an interferometer. We compute the interferometer response to these "geontropic" scalar-metric fluctuations, and apply our results to current and future interferometer measurements, such as LIGO and the proposed GQuEST experiment.
Additional Information
We thank Temple He, Allic Sivaramakrishnan, and Jordan Wilson-Gerow for discussions and comments on the draft, and Lee McCuller for comments and help with recasting the Holometer bounds. We are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation "Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity" collaboration Grant No. 2021-2817. The work of K. Z. is also supported by a Simons Investigator award and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632. The work of Y. C. and D. L. is also supported by the Simons Foundation (Award No. 568762), the Brinson Foundation and the National Science Foundation (via Grants No. PHY-2011961 and No. PHY-2011968).Attached Files
Published - PhysRevD.107.024002.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 119082
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230207-728273600.2
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- 2021-2817
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-SC0011632
- Simons Foundation
- 568762
- Brinson Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2011961
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2011968
- Created
-
2023-03-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-03-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department, TAPIR, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics