@article{Ma:2022:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013024,
author = {Ma, Y and Guff, T and Morley, GW and Pikovski, I and Kim, MS},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013024},
journal = {Physical Review Research},
pages = {1--7},
title = {Limits on inference of gravitational entanglement},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013024},
volume = {4},
year = {2022}
}

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TY  - JOUR
AB  - Combining gravity with quantum mechanics remains one of the biggest challenges of physics. In the past years, experiments with opto-mechanical systems have been proposed that may give indirect clues about the quantum nature of gravity. In a recent variation of such tests [D. Carney et al., Phys.Rev.X Quantum 2, 030330 (2021)], the authors ropose to gravitationally entangle an atom interferometer with a mesoscopic oscillator. The interaction results in periodic drops and revivals of the interferometeric visibility, which under specific assumptions indicate the gravitational generation of entanglement. Here we study semi-classical models of the atom interferometer that can reproduce the same effect. We show that the core signature – periodic collapses and revivals of the visibility – can appear if the atom is subject to a random unitary channel, including the casewhere the oscillator is fully classical and situations even without explicit modelling of the oscillator. We also show that the non-classicality of the oscillator vanishes unless the system is very close to its ground state, and even when the system is in the ground state, the non-classicality is limitedby the coupling strength. Our results thus indicate that deducing ntanglement from the proposed experiment is very challenging, since fulfilling and verifying the non-classicality assumptions is a significant challenge on its own right.
AU  - Ma,Y
AU  - Guff,T
AU  - Morley,GW
AU  - Pikovski,I
AU  - Kim,MS
DO  - 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013024
EP  - 7
PY  - 2022///
SN  - 2643-1564
SP  - 1
TI  - Limits on inference of gravitational entanglement
T2  - Physical Review Research
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013024
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/93259
VL  - 4
ER  - 

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