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Published June 15, 2019 | Published
Journal Article Open

Effect of quantum and thermal jitter on the feasibility of Bekenstein's proposed experiment to search for Planck-scale signals

Abstract

A proposed experiment to test whether space is discretized [J. D. Bekenstein, Phys. Rev. D 86, 124040 (2012); Found. Phys. 44, 452 (2014)] is based on the supposed impossibility of an incident photon causing a displacement of a transparent block by less than the Planck length. An analysis of the quantum and thermal jitter of the block shows that it greatly diminishes the possibility that the experiment could reveal Planck-scale signals.

Additional Information

© 2019 American Physical Society. (Received 30 May 2018; published 28 June 2019) We thank Lowell S. Brown, Richard J. Cook, Ashok Das, Joseph H. Eberly, Adrian C. Melissinos, Emil Mottola, and Peter R. Saulson for their helpful comments. We especially thank Rainer Weiss for so generously sharing his insights relating to the Bekenstein proposal and for pointing out to us the importance of thermal noise due to damping processes even at very low temperatures and pressures, which we had previously neglected by considering only zero-point fluctuations. Research by S. A. Wadood was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant No. W911NF1610162.

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Published - PhysRevD.99.124053.pdf

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