Interferometer Response to Geontropic Fluctuations
Abstract
We model vacuum fluctuations in quantum gravity with a scalar field, characterized by a high occupation number, coupled to the metric. The occupation number of the scalar is given by a thermal density matrix, whose form is motivated by fluctuations in the vacuum energy, which have been shown to be conformal near a light-sheet horizon. For the experimental measurement of interest in an interferometer, the size of the energy fluctuations is fixed by the area of a surface bounding the volume of spacetime being interrogated by an interferometer. We compute the interferometer response to these "geontropic" scalar-metric fluctuations, and apply our results to current and future interferometer measurements, such as LIGO and the proposed GQuEST experiment.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2209.07543,
title = {Interferometer Response to Geontropic Fluctuations},
author = {Dongjun Li and Vincent S. H. Lee and Yanbei Chen and Kathryn M. Zurek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.07543},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
17 pages, 6 figures