Probing spacetime foam with extragalactic sources
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2009-11-11 v2 Astrophysics
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Quantum Physics
Abstract
Due to quantum fluctuations, spacetime is probably ``foamy'' on very small scales. We propose to detect this texture of spacetime foam by looking for core-halo structures in the images of distant quasars. We find that the Very Large Telescope interferometer will be on the verge of being able to probe the fabric of spacetime when it reaches its design performance. Our method also allows us to use spacetime foam physics and physics of computation to infer the existence of dark energy/matter, independent of the evidence from recent cosmological observations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0508121,
title = {Probing spacetime foam with extragalactic sources},
author = {W. A. Christiansen and Y. Jack Ng and H. van Dam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0508121},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
LaTeX, 11 pages, 1 figure; version submitted to PRL; several references added; very useful comments and suggestions by Eric Perlman incorporated