Could dark energy be measured in the lab?
Abstract
The experimentally measured spectral density of current noise in Josephson junctions provides direct evidence for the existence of zero-point fluctuations. Assuming that the total vacuum energy associated with these fluctuations cannot exceed the presently measured dark energy of the universe, we predict an upper cutoff frequency of nu_c=(1.69 +- 0.05) x 10^12 Hz for the measured frequency spectrum of zero-point fluctuations in the Josephson junction. The largest frequencies that have been reached in the experiments are of the same order of magnitude as nu_c and provide a lower bound on the dark energy density of the universe. It is shown that suppressed zero-point fluctuations above a given cutoff frequency can lead to 1/f noise. We propose an experiment which may help to measure some of the properties of dark energy in the lab.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0406504,
title = {Could dark energy be measured in the lab?},
author = {Christian Beck and Michael C. Mackey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0406504},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Replaced by final version accepted by Phys. Lett. B. 5 pages, 1 figure. additional text on the physical interpretation of the measured noise spectrum in Fig.1, more references added, Title has slightly changed