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Showing posts with the label gravity

Neutrons Used to Probe Dark Matter

From [1] I'm reading up on a recent expeirment that used a neutron/gravity spectrometer to look for evidence of dark matter and dark energy.  I haven't got to review enough material to say something truly pithy here yet, but I thought I'd point you towards the stuff that's available.  First, here's a discussion of the experiment [1] from Texas A&M's own Dr. Schleich.  He's talked about this kind of thing before, (using neutrons for experiments involving gravity).  In fact, a little more than a year ago he gave a talk here on the KC interferometer  and how it measured the acceleration due to gravity as opposed to the gravitational redshift as claimed by the authors[2].  His summary of the current set of experiments comes with the added bonus of a pointer to the open access version of the Physics Review Letters article on the experiment [3].  If you'd like to know how exactly you reflect a neutron from a wall without using coulombic forces which ...

Neutron Phase and Gravity

In my research this morning, I came across a collection of interesting articles from the 1970s where researchers observed a shift in the phase of a neutron's quantum wave function because of a change in the gravitational potential. This is similar to the Aharanov-Bohm effect, but using a gravitational rather than an electromagnetic potential. If you're a university student like myself, all the journal links below should be accessible via your university's library. The experiment design is described in Experimental Test of Gravitationally Induced Quantum Interference The results of the experiment are presented in: Observation of Gravitationally Induced Quantum Interference Another similar experiment by the same researchers was described in: Observation of a Phase Shift of a Neutron Due to Precession in a Magnetic Field For a nice primer of all things Aharanov-Bohm with reference to the above mentioned experiments, see Reviews of Modern Physics: The quantum effe...