No Arabic abstract
Lorentz symmetry violation (LV) was recently proposed to be testable with a new method, in which the effect of the violation is described as a certain local interaction [R. Shaniv, et al, PRL 120, 103202 (2018)]. We revisit this LV effect in the paper and show that it is not only local, but it also represents a classical violation according to the recent quantum formulation of the Einstein equivalence principle (EEP). Based on a harmonically trapped spin-1/2 atomic system, we apply the results of table-top experiments testing LV effect to estimate the corresponding violation parameter in the quantum formulation of EEP. We find that the violation parameter is indeed very small, as expected by the earlier theoretical estimation.
We report a joint test of local Lorentz invariance and the Einstein equivalence principle for electrons, using long-term measurements of the transition frequency between two nearly degenerate states of atomic dysprosium. We present many-body calculations which demonstrate that the energy splitting of these states is particularly sensitive to violations of both special and general relativity. We limit Lorentz violation for electrons at the level of $10^{-17}$, matching or improving the best laboratory and astrophysical limits by up to a factor of 10, and improve bounds on gravitational redshift anomalies for electrons by 2 orders of magnitude, to $10^{-8}$. With some enhancements, our experiment may be sensitive to Lorentz violation at the level of $9times 10^{-20}$.
A recent proposal for testing Lorentz symmetry violation (LSV) presents a formulation where the effect of violation is described as a local interaction [R. Shaniv, et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 103202 (2018)]. An entangled ion pair in a decoherence free subspace (DFS) is shown to double the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of one ion, while (even)-N/2 such DFS pairs in a collective entangled state improve SNR by N times, provided the state parity or the even/odd numbers of ions can be measured. It remains to find out, however, how such fiducial entangled states can be prepared at nonexponentially small success rates. This work suggests two types of many particle entangled states for testing LSV: the maximally entangled NOON state, which can achieve Heisenberg limited precision; and the balanced spin-1 Dicke state, which is readily available in deterministic fashion. We show that the latter also lives in a DFS and is immune to stray magnetic fields. It can achieve classical precision limit or the standard quantum limit (SQL) based on collective population measurement without individual atom resolution. Given the high interests in LSV and in entanglement assisted quantum metrology, our observation offers additional incentives for pursuing practical applications of many atom entangled states.
A long-range fifth force coupled to dark matter can induce a coupling to ordinary matter if the dark matter interacts with Standard Model fields. We consider constraints on such a scenario from both astrophysical observations and laboratory experiments. We also examine the case where the dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle, and derive relations between the coupling to dark matter and the coupling to ordinary matter for different models. Currently, this scenario is most tightly constrained by galactic dynamics, but improvements in Eotvos experiments can probe unconstrained regions of parameter space.
Among the information provided by high energy neutrinos, a promising possibility is to analyze the effects of a Violation of Equivalence Principle (VEP) on neutrino oscillations. We analyze the recently released IceCube data on atmospheric neutrino fluxes under the assumption of a VEP and obtain updated constraints on the parameter space with the benchmark choice that neutrinos with different masses couple with different strengths to the gravitational field. In this case we find that the VEP parameters times the local gravitational potential at Earth can be constrained at the level of $10^{-27}$. We show that the constraints from atmospheric neutrinos strongly depend on the assumption that the neutrino eigenstates interacting diagonally with the gravitational field coincide with the mass eigenstates, which is not textit{a priori} justified: this is particularly clear in the case that the basis of diagonal gravitational interaction coincide with the flavor basis, which cannot be constrained by the observation of atmospheric neutrinos. Finally, we quantitatively study the effect of a VEP on the flavor composition of the astrophysical neutrinos, stressing again the interplay with the basis in which the VEP is diagonal: we find that for some choices of such basis the flavor ratio measured by IceCube can significantly change.
Among the information provided by high energy neutrinos, a promising possibility is to analyze the effects of a Violation of Equivalence Principle (VEP) on neutrino oscillations. We analyze the IceCube data on atmospheric neutrino fluxes under the assumption of a VEP and obtain updated constraints on the parameter space with the benchmark choice that neutrinos with different masses couple with different strengths to the gravitational field. In this case we find that the VEP parameters times the local gravitational potential at Earth can be constrained at the level of $10^{-27}$. We show that the constraints from atmospheric neutrinos strongly depend on the assumption that the neutrino eigenstates interacting diagonally with the gravitational field coincide with the mass eigenstates, which is not a priori justified: this is particularly clear in the case that the basis of diagonal gravitational interaction coincide with the flavor basis, which cannot be constrained by the observation of atmospheric neutrinos. Finally, we quantitatively study the effect of a VEP on the flavor composition of the astrophysical neutrinos, stressing again the interplay with the basis in which the VEP is diagonal: we find that for some choices of such basis the flavor ratio measured by IceCube can significantly change.