Related papers: Probing spacetime foam with extragalactic sources
A very simple wormhole geometry is considered as a model of a mode of topological fluctutation in Planck-scale spacetime foam. Quantum dynamics of the hole reduces to quantum mechanics of one variable, throat radius, and admits a WKB…
We review the possibility that quantum fluctuations in the structure of space-time at the Planck scale might be subject to experimental probes. We study the effects of space-time foam in an approach inspired by string theory, in which…
A satisfactory theory of quantum gravity may necessitate a drastic modification of our perception of space-time, by giving it a foamy structure at distances comparable to the Planck length. It is argued in this essay that the experimental…
The model of a classical spacetime foam is considered, which consists of static wormholes embedded in Minkowski spacetime. We examine the propagation of particles in such a medium and demonstrate that a single thin ray undergoes a specific…
Extra-galactic sources of photons have been used to constrain space-time quantum fluctuations in the Universe. In these proposals, the fundamental "fuzziness" of distance caused by space-time quantum fluctuations has been directly…
Wheeler's conjectured "spacetime foam" -- large quantum fluctuations of spacetime at the Planck scale -- could have important implications for quantum gravity, perhaps even explaining why the cosmological constant seems so small. Here I…
Quantum gravitational effects, on the one hand, lead to a limitation in the accuracy of measuring spatial and time intervals, and, on the other hand, they generate a discrete of spacetime structure (quantum foam). The common source of both…
Context: Strings and other alternative theories describing the quantum properties of space-time suggest that space-time could present a foamy structure and also that, in certain cases, quantum gravity (QG) may manifest at energies much…
I propose a phenomenological description of space-time foam and discuss the experimental limits that are within reach of forthcoming experiments.
In Phys. Rev. D77 (2008) 105001, we have studied decoherence models for flavour oscillations in four-dimensional stochastically fluctuating space times and discussed briefly the sensitivity of current terrestrial and astrophysical neutrino…
In this work, I review some aspects concerning the evolution of quantum low-energy fields in a foamlike spacetime, with involved topology at the Planck scale but with a smooth metric structure at large length scales, as follows. Quantum…
The intimate geometry of space-time is expected to suffer stochastic fluctuations as a result of quantum gravitational effects. These fluctuations may induce observable consequences on the propagation of high energy particles over large…
Perhaps the cosmological constant really is huge at the Planck scale, but is "hidden" by Planck scale quantum fluctuations of spacetime. I briefly review this proposal and provide some evidence, coming from a simplified midisuperspace…
A coherent superposition of N Schwarzschild wormholes is proposed as a model for spacetime foam. Following the subtraction procedure for manifolds with boundaries, we calculate by variational methods the Casimir energy. A proposal for an…
We show that the spatial structure of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, predicted by quantum electrodynamics, can be indirectly observed using thermal noise at radio frequencies. Using simple lab equipment like coaxial cables and RF…
Spacetime foam is analyzed within the simplistic model of a set of scalar fields on a flat background. We suggest the formula for the path integral which allows to account for the all possible topologies of spacetime. We show that the…
There are not many tools to quantitatively monitor the emergence of classical geometric features from a quantum spacetime, whose microscopic structure may be a highly quantum-fluctuating "spacetime foam". To improve this situation, we…
A simple model of spacetime foam, made by N wormholes in a semiclassical approximation, is taken under examination. The Casimir-like energy of the quantum fluctuation of such a model and its probability of being realized are computed.…
The cosmological constant problem is a fundamental issue that has puzzled researchers in the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology for a long time. It arises from the discrepancy between the observed value of the cosmological constant…
A simple locus model for the space-time fabric is presented and is compared with quantum foam and random walk models. The induced indeterminacies in momentum are calculated and it is shown that these space-time fabric indeterminacies are,…