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The plan is laid out in greater detail in the paper by Bose and co-authors — an Ocean’s Eleven cast of experts for different steps of the proposal. In his lab at the University of Warwick, for instance, co-author Gavin Morley is working on step one, attempting to put a microdiamond in a quantum superposition of two locations. To do this, he’ll embed a nitrogen atom in the microdiamond, next to a vacancy in the diamond’s structure, and zap it with a microwave pulse. An electron orbiting the nitrogen-vacancy system both absorbs the light and doesn’t, and the system enters a quantum superposition of two spin directions — up and down — like a spinning top that has some probability of spinning clockwise and some chance of spinning counterclockwise. The microdiamond, laden with this superposed spin, is subjected to a magnetic field, which makes up-spins move left while down-spins go right. The diamond itself therefore splits into a superposition of two trajectories.
In the full experiment, the researchers must do all this to two diamonds — a blue one and a red one, say — suspended next to each other inside an ultracold vacuum. When the trap holding them is switched off, the two microdiamonds, each in a superposition of two locations, fall vertically through the vacuum. As they fall, the diamonds feel each other’s gravity. But how strong is their gravitational attraction?
If gravity is a quantum interaction, then the answer is: It depends. Each component of the blue diamond’s superposition will experience a stronger or weaker gravitational attraction to the red diamond, depending on whether the latter is in the branch of its superposition that’s closer or farther away.
As I described in an article this week on a new theoretical attempt to explain away dark matter, many leading physicists now consider space-time and gravity to be “emergent” phenomena: Bendy, curvy space-time and the matter within it are a hologram that arises out of a network of entangled qubits (quantum bits of information), much as the three-dimensional environment of a computer game is encoded in the classical bits on a silicon chip. “I think we now understand that space-time really is just a geometrical representation of the entanglement structure of these underlying quantum systems,” said Mark Van Raamsdonk, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia.