Entanglement and squeezing of gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper proposes that nonlinear interactions in general relativity can generate and detect quantum features in gravitational waves, opening new avenues for exploring quantum gravity through gravitational wave observations.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework showing how gravitational wave nonlinearities can produce and reveal quantum states, a novel approach in quantum gravity research.

Findings

Nonlinear gravitational interactions can produce nonclassical states of gravitational waves.

Quantum features of input states can influence the output of gravitational nonlinear processes.

The approach offers a new method to probe the quantum nature of gravity.

Abstract

We show that the self-interactions present in the effective field theory formulation of general relativity can couple gravitational wave modes and generate nonclassical states. The output of gravitational nonlinear processes can also be sensitive to quantum features of the input states, indicating that nonlinearities can act both as sources and detectors of quantum features of gravitational waves. Due to gauge and quantization issues in strongly curved spacetimes, we work in the geometric optics limit of gravitational radiation, but we expect the key ideas extend to situations of astrophysical interest. This offers a new direction for probing the quantum nature of gravity, analogous to how the quantumness of electrodynamics was established through quantum optics.