GQuEST

Latest news and milestones

• April 11, 2024: Sander M. Vermeulen, et. al. wrote, Photon Counting Interferometry to Detect Geontropic Space-Time Fluctuations with GQuEST. The article describes the GQuEST project at length.

• February 26, 2024: Vacuum components from the Holometer are being installed at Caltech as part of a technology demonstrator. The demonstrator will be used to measure performance of systems for GQuEST. See photo

• May 18, 2023: Graduate student Mathew Bub (Caltech) et al. write Quantum Gravity Background in Next-Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors. Following the work of his thesis advisor, Kathryn Zurek, Mathew and his colleages detail effects of geontropic vacuum fluctuations on upcoming experiments, including GQuEST.

• April 21, 2023: Lee McCuller joins Caltech Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. At the Edge of Physics | Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Lee McCuller’s PhD work at the University of Chicago culminated as on the Fermilab Holometer experiment. His subsequent LIGO work on squeezed light let to ideas that form the basis of GQuEST.

• January 4, 2023: Dongjun Li and Vincent Lee et al. publish Interferometer response to geontropic fluctuations. The expected response to geontropic scalar-metric fluctuations are calculated for LIGO and GQuEST

• Nov 1, 2022: Erik Verlinde (Amsterdam U.) and GQuEST Co-I Kathryn Zurek (Caltech) publish Modular fluctuations from shockwave geometries, which sets the scale of vacuum fluctuations. From the paper: “An important question in quantum gravity is to determine the size of the quantum fluctuations in the spacetime geometry. Recent advances in understanding the (emergent) properties of gravity and spacetime in connection to quantum information theory offer a concrete path towards answering this question.” The paper proposes a fundament noise term for the propagation that yields a new way to estimate quantum uncertainties in position.

• July 14, 2022: Funding approved. The Office of High Energy Physics of the Department of Energy notifies Chris Stoughton (Fermilab) and Kathryn Zurek (Caltech) that their proposal for “Gravity from Quantum Entanglement of Space Time (GQuEST)” is approved. This is the result of a year-long effort by the GQuEST collaboration and the Office of High Energy Physics to propose and review the five-year project. A review panel highlighted the importance of continuing the close collaboration of theoretical work and experimental design, while recognizing the world-class talent that the collaboration brings to this project.