https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921905003
Testing gravity at short distances: Gravity Resonance Spectroscopy with qBounce
1 Institut Laue-Langevin, 71 avenue des Martyrs, 38000 Grenoble, France
2 Atominstitut TU Wien, Stadionallee 2, 1020 Wien, Austria
a e-mail: jenke@ill.fr
b e-mail: abele@ati.ac.at
Published online: 12 December 2019
Neutrons are the ideal probes to test gravity at short distances – electrically neutral and only hardly polarizable. Furthermore, very slow, so-called ultracold neutrons form bound quantum states in the gravity potential of the Earth. This allows combining gravity experiments at short distances with powerful resonance spectroscopy techniques, as well as tests of the interplay between gravity and quantum mechanics. In the last decade, the qBounce collaboration has been performing several measurement campaigns at the ultracold and very cold neutron facility PF2 at the Institut Laue-Langevin. A new spectroscopy technique, Gravity Resonance Spectroscopy, was developed. The results were applied to test various Dark Energy and Dark Matter scenarios in the lab, like Axions, Chameleons and Symmetrons. This article reviews Gravity Resonance Spectroscopy, explains its key technology and summarizes the results obtained during the past decade.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
