2007/08/20 by Giri, Pulak Ranjan
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0708.2649
Gravity is the weakest of all four known forces in the universe. Quantum states of an elementary particle due to such a weak field is certainly very shallow and would therefore be an experimental challenge to detect. Recently an experimental attempt was made by V. V. Nesvizhevsky et al., Nature 415, 297 (2002), to measure the quantum states of a neutron, which shows that ground state and few excited states are ∼ 10-12eV. We show that the energy of the ground state of a neutron confined above Earth's surface should be ∼ 10-37eV. The experimentally observed energy levels are 1025 times deeper than the actual energy levels it should be and thus certainly not due to gravitational effect of Earth. Therefore the correct interpretation for the painstaking experimental results of Ref. \citenes1 is due to the confinement potential of a one dimensional box of length L ∼ 50μm, generated from the experimental setup as commented before \citehansoon. Our results thus creates a new challenge to the experimentalist to resolve the shallow energy levels of the neutron in Earth's gravitational field in future.