Laboratory tests on dark energy
Abstract
The physical nature of the currently observed dark energy in the universe is completely unclear, and many different theoretical models co-exist. Nevertheless, if dark energy is produced by vacuum fluctuations then there is a chance to probe some of its properties by simple laboratory tests based on Josephson junctions. These electronic devices can be used to perform `vacuum fluctuation spectroscopy', by directly measuring a noise spectrum induced by vacuum fluctuations. One would expect to see a cutoff near 1.7 THz in the measured power spectrum, provided the new physics underlying dark energy couples to electric charge. The effect exploited by the Josephson junction is a subtile nonlinear mixing effect and has nothing to do with the Casimir effect or other effects based on van der Waals forces. A Josephson experiment of the suggested type will now be built, and we should know the result within the next 3 years.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0512327,
title = {Laboratory tests on dark energy},
author = {Christian Beck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0512327},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
7 pages, 1 figure. Invited talk given at the 21 COE symposium 'Astrophysics as Interdisciplinary Science', Waseda University, Tokyo, 1-3 September 2005. To appear in Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Misprints in eq. (3) and (4) corrected