Testing Whether Gravity Acts as a Quantum Entity When Measured

TL;DR

This paper proposes a multi-interferometer experiment to test whether gravity exhibits quantum behavior by detecting measurement-induced disturbances, without requiring entanglement or specific nonclassical gravity models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup that can reveal gravity's nonclassicality through measurement disturbance, independent of entanglement or specific gravity models.

Findings

The experiment can detect quantum measurement disturbance in gravity.

It does not require entanglement between gravitational degrees of freedom.

The test is device independent and applicable at finite decoherence rates.

Abstract

A defining signature of classical systems is "in principle measurability" without disturbance: a feature manifestly violated by quantum systems. We describe a multi-interferometer experimental setup that can, in principle, reveal the nonclassicality of a spatial superposition-sourced gravitational field if an irreducible disturbance is caused by a measurement of gravity. While one interferometer sources the field, the others are used to measure the gravitational field created by the superposition. This requires neither any specific form of nonclassical gravity, nor the generation of entanglement between any relevant degrees of freedom at any stage, thus distinguishing it from the experiments proposed so far. This test, when added to the recent entanglement-witness based proposals, enlarges the domain of quantum postulates being tested for gravity. Moreover, the proposed test yields a signature of quantum measurement induced disturbance for any finite rate of decoherence, and is device independent.