Abstract
Hypothetical models have been proposed in which explicit collapse mechanisms prevent the superposition principle from holding at large scales. In particular, the model introduced by Ellis et al. [J. Ellis et al., Phys. Lett. B 221, 113 (1989)] suggests that quantum gravity might be responsible for the collapse of the wave function of massive objects in spatial superpositions. We consider here a recent experiment reporting on interferometry with atoms delocalized over half a meter for a time scale of 1 s [T. Kovachy et al., Nature (London) 528, 530 (2015)] and show that the corresponding data strongly bound quantum-gravity-induced decoherence and rule it out in the parameter regime considered originally.
- Received 25 October 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.062111
©2016 American Physical Society