Related papers: Quantum Mechanics and Gravitation
Quantum states in the Earth's gravitational field can be observed, when ultra-cold neutrons fall under gravity. In an experiment at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, neutrons are reflected and trapped in a gravitational cavity above a…
Gravity is the most familiar force at our natural length scale. However, it is still exotic from the view point of particle physics. The first experimental study of quantum effects under gravity was performed using a cold neutron beam in…
Quantum states in the Earth's gravitational field were observed, when ultra-cold neutrons fall under gravity. The experimental results can be described by the quantum mechanical scattering model as it is presented here. We also discuss…
We have studied neutron quantum states in the potential well formed by the earth's gravitational field and a horizontal mirror. The estimated characteristic sizes of the neutron wave functions in the two lowest quantum states correspond to…
Ultracold neutrons (UCNs) can be bound by the potential of terrestrial gravity and a reflecting mirror. The wave function of the bound state has characteristic modulations. We carried out an experiment to observe the vertical distribution…
At the beginning of the previous century, Newtonian mechanics fell victim to two new revolutionary theories, Quantum Mechanics (QM) and General Relativity (GR). Both theories have transformed our view of physical phenomena, with QM…
The experiment performed with ultra-cold neutrons at the Laue-Langevin Institute, Grenoble, is analyzed in view of the claim that ``neutron quantum states in Earth gravitational field'' are observed. Our conclusion is that the above claim…
We consider an extension of the recent experiment with ultracold neutrons and the quantization of its vertical motion in order to test the Weak Equivalence Principle. We show that an improvement on the energy resolution of the experiment…
This work focuses on the control and understanding of a gravitationally interacting elementary quantum system. It offers a new way of looking at gravitation based on quantum interference: an ultracold neutron, a quantum particle, as an…
Gravity is the weakest of all four known forces in the universe. Quantum states of an elementary particle due to such a weak field is certainly very shallow and would therefore be an experimental challenge to detect. Recently an…
The GRANIT project is the follow-up of the pioneering experiments that first observed the quantum states of neutrons trapped in the earth's gravitational field at the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL). Due to the weakness of the gravitational…
A topic of present interest is the application of experimentally observed quantum mechanical levels of ultra-cold neutrons in the earth's gravitational field for searching short-range modifications to gravity. A constraint on new forces in…
We investigate the consequences of Lorentz violation (as expressed within the gravity sector of the Standard-Model Extension) for gravitational quantum states of ultracold neutrons (UCNs). Since our main aim is to compare our theoretical…
We propose a method for observation of the quasi-stationary states of neutrons, localized near the curved mirror surface. The bounding effective well is formed by the centrifugal potential and the mirror Fermi-potential. This phenomenon is…
The bouncing neutron is one of the rare system where gravity can be studied in a quantum framework. To this end it is crucial to be able to select some specific gravitational quantum state (GQS). The GRANIT apparatus is the first physics…
The quantum bouncer (QB) concept is a known QM textbook example of confined particle, namely, a solution to the 1D Schroedinger equation for a linear potential (the so-called Airy equation). It would be a great methodological challenge to…
The recently observed quantum states of neutrons bound in a gravitational field are analyzed in the framework of one-parameter isospectral hamiltonians. Potentials isospectral to the usual Newton potential are explicitly constructed for the…
A theory of gravitational quantum states of ultracold neutrons in waveguides with absorbing/scattering walls is presented. The theory covers recent experiments in which the ultracold neutrons were beamed between a mirror and a rough…
We consider E. Verlinde's proposal that gravity is an entropic force -- we shall call this theory entropic gravity (EG) -- and reanalyze a recent claim that this theory is in contradiction with the observation of the gravitationally-bound…
We explore the possibility of testing the quantum nature of the gravitational field with an ensemble of ultra-cold atoms. The use of many microscopic particles may circumvent some of the experimental obstacles encountered in recent…