Related papers: Atom interferometers and a small-scale test of gen…
One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are…
We present two projects aiming to probe key aspects of the theory of General Relativity with high-precision quantum sensors. These projects use cold-atom interferometry with the aim of measuring gravitational waves and testing the…
Atom interferometers allow the measurement of the acceleration of freely falling atoms with respect to an experimental platform at rest on Earth's surface. Such experiments have been used to test the universality of free fall by comparing…
The influence of an external test mass on the phase of the signal of an atom interferometer is studied theoretically. Using traditional techniques in atom optics based on the density matrix equations in the Wigner representation, we are…
After an introduction on phenomena due to spin and mass-energy currents on clocks and photons, we review the 1995-2001 measurements of the gravitomagnetic field of Earth and Lense-Thirring effect obtained by analyzing the orbits of the two…
We consider a nearly free falling Earth satellite where atomic wave interferometers are tied to a telescope pointing towards a faraway star. They measure the acceleration and the rotation relatively to the local inertial frame. We calculate…
The creation of delocalized coherent superpositions of quantum systems experiencing different relativistic effects is an important milestone in future research at the interface of gravity and quantum mechanics. This could be achieved by…
The aim of this paper is to study the extra phase shift that general relativity (GR) predicts for a radial light ray propagating in the vicinity of a static spherical symmetric body. It appears that the gravitational phase shift test yields…
We study generic tests of strong-field General Relativity using gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral of compact binaries. Previous studies have considered simple extensions to the standard post-Newtonian waveforms that differ by…
Even if Einstein's General Relativity achieved a great success and overcame lots of experimental tests, it also showed some shortcomings and flaws which today advise theorists to ask if it is the definitive theory of gravity. In this essay…
Quantum reflection occurs when ultra-cold atoms are incident on a material surface with sufficiently low velocity. The reflecting matter wave can interfere with the incident wave to form a detectable pattern, and this pattern contains…
All existing quantum gravity proposals share the same deep problem. Their predictions are extremely hard to test in practice. Quantum effects in the gravitational field are exceptionally small, unlike those in the electromagnetic field. The…
Einstein's theory of general relativity states that clocks at different gravitational potentials tick at different rates - an effect known as the gravitational redshift. As fundamental probes of space and time, atomic clocks have long…
The deflection of gamma-rays in Earth's gravitational field is tested in laser Compton scattering at high energy accelerators. Within a formalism connecting the bending angle to the photon's momentum it follows that detected gamma-ray…
The unification of quantum theory and the general theory of relativity - describing gravity, is one of the most important challenges in science. Einstein's general theory of relativity is based on the principle of equivalence, and has been…
Direct detection experiments for dark matter are increasingly ruling out large parameter spaces. However, light dark matter models with particle masses $<$ GeV are still largely unconstrained. Here we examine a proposal to use atom…
A relativistic theory of gravity like general relativity produces phenomena differing fundamentally from Newton's theory. An example, analogous to electromagnetic induction, is gravitomagnetism, or the dragging of inertial frames by…
Gravitation, according to General Relativity, is an attribute of space-time's geometry and hence not a force in the Newtonian sense. This is a consequence of Einstein's equivalence principle, which so far passed all experimental tests with…
In 1919, Eddington and Dyson led two famous expeditions to measure the bending of light during a total solar eclipse. The results of this effort led to the first experimental confirmation of Einstein's General Relativity and contributed to…
GINGER is a proposed tridimensional array of laser gyroscopes with the aim of measuring the Lense-Thirring effect, predicted by the General Relativity theory, in a terrestrial laboratory environment. We discuss the required accuracy, the…