Chris Overstreet

Oct 17, 2023 | link.aps.org | Chris Overstreet |Joseph N. Curti |MinJeong Kim |Peter Asenbaum

Experiments are beginning to probe the interaction of quantum particles with gravitational fields beyond the uniform-field regime. In nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, the gravitational field in such experiments can be written as a superposition state. We empirically demonstrate that semiclassical theories of gravity can avoid gravitational superposition states only by decoupling the gravitational field energy from the quantum particle’s time evolution.