Lloyd’s mirror neutron interferometer in the earth gravitational field

Andrei Galiautdinov, Lewis H. Ryder

Валерий Викторович Несвижевский, Hans G. Börner, Alexander K. Petukhov +8 more

Валерий Викторович Несвижевский, Konstantin V. Protasov

Vijay A. Singh, Praveen Pathak, K. Krishna Chaitanya

Christian Käding, Mario Pitschmann, H. Abele

Abstract The neutron optical Lloyd interferometer can serve as a potent experiment for probing fundamental physics beyond the standard models of particles and cosmology. In this article, we provide a full Green’s function analysis of a Lloyd interferometer in the limit that the reflecting mirror extends to the screen. We consider two distinct situations: first, we will review the theoretical case of no external fields being present. Subsequently, we will analyze the case in which a gravitational field is acting on the neutrons. The latter case provides the theory necessary for using a Lloyd interferometer as a probe of gravitational fields.

Derar Altarawneh, Roman Höllwieser, M. Wellenzohn

We present a theoretical analysis of the experimental data reported by Ichikawa et al. on the spatial distribution of ultracold neutrons in the Earth’s gravitational field above a mirror. The data involve a projection onto a pixelated detector via scattering by a cylindrical mirror. Our study includes a calculation of the theoretical spatial distribution of the probability density associated with the quantum gravitational states of ultracold neutrons. Furthermore, we analyze this spatial distribution using the Wigner function framework. Based on our analysis, we cannot confirm that the experimental data reported by Ichikawa et al. correspond to the spatial distribution of quantum gravitational states of ultracold neutrons.