Gravity has been proposed as a reason quantum superpositions become difficult to observe in everyday objects. A new experiment challenges one longstanding model of this process.
A detector buried deep beneath an Italian mountain has challenged a decades-old theory about why quantum behavior disappears from the world we experience. After 62 days of measurements, researchers found no trace of the faint radiation predicted by a model in which gravity disrupts quantum states. The result rules out this particular explanation while leaving open the possibility that gravity contributes to quantum decoherence.
Decoherence helps explain why particles can display unusual quantum behavior, such as existing in superpositions of different states, while everyday objects appear to follow classical physics. “One of the deepest questions in modern physics is why the strange quantum behavior that governs atoms and elementary particles seems to disappear in the macroscopic world we experience every day,” says Catalina Curceanu, director of research and spokesperson for the VIP Collaboration at the National Laboratory of Frascati of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-LNF) in Italy.
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