Matter-wave coherence limit owing to cosmic gravitational wave background [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05816


We study matter-wave interferometry in the presence of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. It is shown that if the background has a scale-invariant spectrum over a wide bandwidth (which is expected in a class of inflationary models of Big Bang cosmology), then separated-path interference cannot be observed for a lump of matter of size above a limit which is very insensitive to the strength and bandwidth of the fluctuations, unless the interferometer is servo-controlled or otherwise protected. For ordinary solid matter this limit is of order 1–10 mm. A servo-controlled or cross-correlated device would also exhibit limits to the observation of macroscopic interference, which we estimate for ordinary matter moving at speeds small compared to c.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Steane
Tue, 17 Oct 17
44/163

Comments: 8 pages; 3 figures