Israeli scientists’ falling-atom experiment points to new tests at the quantum-gravity frontier
For more than a century, quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity have each passed countless tests, but physicists have struggled to reconcile the two. Now, scientists in Israel and abroad have taken a new step toward understanding how they interact by directly measuring how gravity changes a quantum object as it falls.The findings could eventually contribute to more sensitive quantum sensors for measuring gravity and acceleration, with potential applications in surveying, geological mapping and navigation without relying on GPS.The advance is not simply that scientists measured gravity using quantum atoms; such experiments have been done before. Instead, the researchers directly measured a specific change in the “phase” of a quantum wave as an atom freely fell under gravity—an effect predicted by Einstein’s equivalence principle.The experiment was led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Ulm in Germany and the University of Oxford, with Nobel Prize-winning…
Scientists from Ben-Gurion University, the University of Ulm, and the University of Oxford have conducted an experiment directly measuring how gravity affects a quantum object as it falls, a step toward reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity. The research, published in Science Advances, involved cooling rubidium atoms and using an atom chip to create a superposition where one part of an atom's wave fell freely while another remained static. The researchers then measured the quantum phase shift between these two parts, finding it matched the value predicted by Einstein's equivalence principle for a quantum object. Professor Ron Folman stated, "While people have measured the acceleration of free-falling objects ever since Galileo, no one has ever measured the quantum features of a free-falling quantum object, and specifically, how its phase changes due to free-fall." This experiment demonstrates the compatibility of Einstein's equivalence principle with quantum superposition under tested conditions and opens the door for future experiments using heavier objects, potentially leading to new physics and advanced quantum sensors for gravity and acceleration.
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