2026/06/21 by Peter Renkel · 1 voice
#quant-ph
We propose a direct Ramsey-interferometric test of Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) in which a microscopic system controls the motion of a charged nanoparticle held in a harmonic trap. The microscopic system is prepared in a two-branch Ramsey superposition. During the Ramsey interval, the two branches exert opposite weak forces on the nanoparticle, so the nanoparticle center of mass follows two spatially separated trajectories. The procedure resembles a measurement: information about the microscopic branch is transferred to a mesoscopic object, but the transfer is then reversed coherently. After one period of the harmonic trap, the nanoparticle trajectories recombine in both position and momentum. The microscopic system is then measured through its final Ramsey visibility. Standard quantum mechanics predicts recovery of this visibility, while CSL predicts an irreversible visibility loss accumulated while the nanoparticle mass distributions were separated. At the benchmark number of shots N0=5×105, the baseline polar-molecule and aggressive Rydberg-Stark operating points improve over digitized direct matter-wave CSL bounds by about 1.3×104 and 2.1×105, respectively. These factors scale as √(N/N0), where N is the number of shots. This improvement refers to direct interferometric CSL bounds; the projected sensitivities remain above the strongest non-interferometric CSL bounds, which probe different observables. Although the numerical reach is quoted in CSL parameters, the same visibility-loss measurement applies more broadly to collapse mechanisms that suppress spatial coherence.