Einstein's gravity rule holds up in the quantum world
An international team of physicists has observed, for the first time, that Einstein's equivalence principle of gravity still holds true for a falling quantum object.
For nearly a century, physicists have wondered whether Albert Einstein's equivalence principle, the idea that gravity affects all objects the same way regardless of their mass or composition, would still hold true for matter behaving like a quantum wave. An international team has now put that question to the test.
Led by Professor Ron Folman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, working with researchers from the University of Ulm and the University of Oxford, the team built what they call a Quantum Galileo Interferometer. Using ultracold rubidium atoms held near a tiny atom chip, they measured how gravity affected the atoms' quantum properties as they fell freely.
The team, whose collaborators include Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose, detected a distinctive shift in the atoms' behavior that matched exactly what Einstein's equivalence principle predicts when applied to a quantum object. The results, published in the journal Science Advances, mark the first time this specific effect has been observed.
The experiment doesn't unify gravity with quantum mechanics, but it shows one of Einstein's foundational ideas still holds at the smallest scales, and the same technique could soon be used to test even heavier objects, like nanodiamonds, floating in free fall.
This is a summary. Read the full story at the original source:
Read on ScienceDaily