Testing gravity with cold atom interferometry: Results and prospects

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and application of cold atom interferometers in testing gravity, highlighting their capabilities in measuring gravitational phenomena, probing fundamental physics, and exploring new physics beyond current theories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of past and ongoing experiments with atom interferometers and discusses future prospects for discovering new physics.

Findings

Atom interferometers effectively measure gravity-related quantities.

They have tested fundamental principles like the equivalence principle.

Potential to detect new physics such as dark matter and gravitational waves.

Abstract

Atom interferometers have been developed in the last three decades as new powerful tools to investigate gravity. They were used for measuring the gravity acceleration, the gravity gradient, and the gravity-field curvature, for the determination of the gravitational constant, for the investigation of gravity at microscopic distances, to test the equivalence principle of general relativity and the theories of modified gravity, to probe the interplay between gravitational and quantum physics and to test quantum gravity models, to search for dark matter and dark energy, and they were proposed as new detectors for the observation of gravitational waves. Here I describe past and ongoing experiments with an outlook on what I think are the main prospects in this field and the potential to search for new physics.