A gravitational aharonov-bohm effect, and its connection to parametric oscillators and gravitational radiation

Abstract

A thought experiment is proposed to demonstrate the existence of a gravitational, vector Aharonov-Bohm effect. We begin the analysis starting from four Maxwell-like equations for weak gravitational fields interacting with slowly moving matter. A connection is made between the gravitational, vector Aharonov-Bohm effect and the principle of local gauge invariance for nonrelativistic quantum matter interacting with weak gravitational fields. The compensating vector fields that are necessitated by this local gauge principle are shown to be incorporated by the DeWitt minimal coupling rule. The nonrelativistic Hamiltonian for weak, time-independent fields interacting with quantum matter is then extended to time-dependent fields, and applied to the problem of the interaction of radiation with macroscopically coherent quantum systems, including the problem of gravitational radiation interacting with superconductors. But first we examine the interaction of EM radiation with superconductors in a parametric oscillator consisting of a superconducting wire placed at the center of a high Q superconducting cavity driven by pump microwaves. Some room-temperature data will be presented demonstrating the splitting of a single microwave cavity resonance into a spectral doublet due to the insertion of a centr lwire. This would represent an unseparated kind of parametric oscillator, in which the signal and idler waves would occupy the same volume of space.We then propose a separated parametric oscillator experiment, in which he signal and idler waves are generated in two disjoint regions of space, which are separated from each other by means of an impermeable superconducting membrane. We find that the threshold for parametric oscillation for EM microwave generation is much lower for the separated configuration than the unseparated one, which then leads to an observable dynamical Casimir effect. We speculate that a separated parametric oscillator for generating coherent GR microwaves could also be built. [Editor“s note: for a video of the talk given by Prof. Chiao at the Aharonov-80 conference in 2012 at Chapman University, see quantum.chapman.edu/talk-20.]