Graviton-Photon Conversion in Atoms and the Detection of Gravitons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conversion of gravitons to photons in atomic systems and proposes experimental methods to detect high-energy gravitons and verify gravitational energy quantization using current technology.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of graviton-atom interaction cross sections and proposes novel experiments for graviton detection and gravitational energy quantization verification.

Findings

Enhanced graviton-photon conversion at high frequencies.

Potential detection of MeV gravitons with existing neutrino facilities.

Experimental proposal for gravitational energy quantization verification.

Abstract

We study graviton-photon conversion in potential ground-based experiments. From graviton to photon transition, we calculate the cross section of graviton-atom interaction in the presence of spherical atomic electric fields; the obtained results hold for graviton energy around 100 keV to 1 GeV, and would be enhanced along the coherent length in extremely high frequencies; thus it gives a chance to catch MeV level gravitons from the universe with current neutrino facilities. From photon to graviton transition, we propose an experiment using entangled photon pairs to count missing photons passing through transverse magnetic tunnel, which could be used to verify the energy quantization of gravitational field.