Emily Chan
Physicists have designed an experiment that could detect graviton, a particle that carries the force of gravity. If it does actually exist, it has eluded researchers for more than a century.
The effects of gravity are pretty obvious. All you have to do is knock an object off a table to witness gravity at work.
But seeing the underlying mechanisms of gravity isn’t so simple. Gravitons have such weak interactions that they’ve never been detected, and some experts think they never will be.
A team of physicists from Stockholm University in Sweden is holding out hope that their experiment can measure the “gravito-phononic effect” and identify individual gravitons for the first time ever.
The experiment would involve cooling an almost 4,000-pound bar of aluminum to just above absolute zero.
Then, it needs to be hooked up to continuous quantum sensors and wait for gravitational waves to come into contact with it.
Once that happens, the instrument should issue vibrations of a very small scale that the sensors will detect.
By measuring the vibrations of the instrument, the team believes that they will be able to spot tiny changes in energy levels and detect individual gravitons.
Each vibrational signal can be cross-checked against previous data to confirm they were caused by a gravitational wave event and not background interference. Unfortunately, those quantum sensors do not exist yet. The team wants to build some in the near future.
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