Towards quantum gravity measurement by cold atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experiment using cold atoms and oscillating traps to detect gravitational effects and quantum spacetime fluctuations, aiming to observe quantum energy shifts caused by gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup combining cold atom traps with gravitational fluctuation detection, including theoretical calculations and analysis of measurement challenges.

Findings

Calculated the quantum gravity-induced power on atomic ensembles

Analyzed the density profile of BEC under time-dependent perturbation

Discussed potential experimental challenges and future prospects

Abstract

We propose an experiment for the measurement of gravitational effect on cold atoms by applying a one-dimensional vertically sinusoidal oscillation to the magneto-optical trap; and observe the signature of low quantum energy shift of quantum bound states as a consequence of gravitational fluctuation. To this end, we present brief details of the experiment on a BEC, and a simplistic calculation of the Gross-Pitaevskii solution using Thomas-Fermi approximation with focus on the density of the BEC, for the time-dependent perturbation. Moreover, we calculate the power induced by quantum gravity on a generic atomic ensemble. We also address the possible challenges for the measurement of the expected results. And finally, we discuss the prospect of further developing this experiment towards measuring the effect of quantum spacetime fluctuations on cold atoms.