Discriminating the effects of collapse models from environmental diffusion with levitated nanospheres

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method using levitated nanospheres in a cavity to detect collapse model noise, distinguishing it from environmental decoherence by analyzing the system's stationary state under specific conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a simple experimental procedure to identify collapse noise effects in quantum systems using levitated nanospheres, enhancing testability of collapse models.

Findings

Stationary state sensitivity to collapse noise under certain conditions

Detection of collapse noise despite environmental decoherence

Dependence on trapping frequency, cavity size, and momentum diffusion

Abstract

Collapse models postulate the existence of intrinsic noise which modifies quantum mechanics and is responsible for the emergence of macroscopic classicality. Assessing the validity of these models is extremely challenging because it is nontrivial to discriminate unambiguously their presence in experiments where other hardly controllable sources of noise compete to the overall decoherence. Here we provide a simple procedure able to probe the hypothetical presence of the collapse noise with a levitated nanosphere in a Fabry-Perot cavity. We show that the stationary state of the system is particularly sensitive, under specific experimental conditions, to the interplay between the trapping frequency, the cavity size, and the momentum diffusion induced by the collapse models, allowing to detect them even in the presence of standard environmental noises.