Entanglement is a fundamental and fascinating property of quantum mechanics and allows two particles to remain intimately linked regardless of the distance between them. This property represents an essential resource for many applications, such as quantum communications and cryptography. Although this resource is well controlled at the microscopic level, its link with the gravitational force acting on a macroscopic scale has not been explored so far. Two researchers from the LNE-SYRTE laboratory (CNRS, Paris Observatory, Sorbonne University, Paris Science and Letters University) and the University of Vienna in Austria have just proposed an experiment to study the link between entanglement and gravitation. .
In their proposal, published in the journal of Physical Review Letters, they propose to drop two different atoms next to each other, as in the experiment conducted by Galileo from the top of the Pisa tower. But unlike traditional experiments, such as the Microscope experiment for example, the two free-falling particles are this time entangled, ie intimately linked together by quantum physics. The experiment, which would use atomic physics methods already well mastered in the laboratory, would make it possible to make a gravitation test of a totally different nature than those realized until now. Such an experiment would explore for the first time the effect of entanglement on the equivalence between the gravity mass and the inertial mass, which is one of the founding principles of General Relativity, and could lead to discoveries contributing to the unification of modern theories of physics.
Reference
- Proposal for a quantum test of the weak equivalence principle with entangled atomic species, Geiger and Trupke, Phys. Rev. Letters