Detect single-graviton absorption in a massive acoustic resonator
This text mentions work from 2024 on. Those parts were partly written without a live literature search and have not been checked by an editor yet.
In plain words
A heavy resonator cooled to its lowest vibration state could absorb a single quantum of a passing gravitational wave, called a graviton, and jump up by one vibration quantum. Detecting such jumps is argued to be within reach, but whether they would prove that gravity is quantum is disputed.
Precise statement
Tobar, Manikandan, Beitel and Pikovski (Nature Communications 2024) propose a resonant-mass detector with a kHz-band mode cooled near its ground state and continuously monitored for single-phonon transitions coincident with gravitational waves detected by LIGO. Determine whether such transitions can be detected, and which observable (counting statistics or correlations that no classical wave drive reproduces) would exclude a classical gravitational-wave explanation, which Carney, Domcke and Rodd (PRD 2024) argue a record of single transitions alone cannot do.
What would settle it
Resonator quantum jumps coincident with a LIGO event together with a statistical signature excluded for every classical gravitational-wave drive.
Status in the literature
Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.
Proposed in 2024 (doi:10.1038/s41467-024-51420-8); the interpretive objection is doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.109.044009, and a 2026 follow-up by the proposing group analyzes stimulated absorption (Annals of Physics 489, doi:10.1016/j.aop.2026.170448).
Parent problems
- Special case of Must the gravitational field obey quantum superposition? · open · from revision 1
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