Quantumness of gravity in harmonically trapped particles

Abstract

This study investigates the quantumness of gravity under the setup of the atomic interferometry. We evaluated interference visibility considering a particle with internal energy levels in a harmonic trapping potential. As per the result, for a spatially superposed gravitational source mass, interference visibility exhibits collapse and revival behavior, which implies that an initial separable internal state evolves to the entangled state with respect to the degrees-of-freedom of the center of mass, the internal energy levels, and the external source state. In particular, it does not exhibit revival behavior when gravity is treated as a quantum interaction; however, it revives with a finite period for a semi-classical treatment of gravity. We also examined the temporal behavior of entanglement negativity and found that the entanglement between the internal energy state and the external source state is uniquely created by the quantum interaction of gravity in accordance with the mass-energy equivalence and the weak equivalence principle.