van de Kamp, Thomas (2020) Casimir screening of the QGEM-protocol. Bachelor's Thesis, Physics.
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Abstract
The Quantum Gravity induced Entanglement of Masses (QGEM)-protocol is an experiment whose goal is to test the quantum nature of gravity by bringing two, mesoscopic, test masses both in a spatial superposition and letting them entangle through their gravitational interaction. Measuring the entanglement implies that the communicator responsible for the entanglement, which is gravity, is of a quantum nature. One of the problems of the current setup of the QGEM-protocol is that this communicator can also be of electromagnetic nature, since the Casimir-Polder force can entangle the test masses. This restricts the length scale in which the gravitational force is dominant, limiting the mass and superposition size needed to measure the entanglement induced by the gravitational interaction. Therefore, in this thesis, a slight modification to this setup is proposed: the insertion of a thin perfectly conducting plate in between the test masses which effectively screens the Casimir-Polder potential, but introduces a Casimir force between the plate and the test masses. With this modified setup, one can measure entanglement for masses and superposition sizes of one order magnitude lower than suggested in the original proposal, from 10 to 1 pg and 200 to 23μm respectively. Consequently, this also reduces the need to use a highly advanced magnetic field gradient of 1 MT/m, to create the superposition, to a laboratory allowed magnetic field gradient of 0.01 MT/m.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis) |
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| Supervisor name: | Mazumdar, A. and Roest, D. |
| Degree programme: | Physics |
| Thesis type: | Bachelor's Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jul 2020 11:24 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jul 2020 11:24 |
| URI: | https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/22532 |
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