An article published in Nature in which Guglielmo Maria Tino, professor of Matter Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and associated with the CNR National Institute of Optics, collaborated. The article is based on an experiment conducted by the group directed by Holger Müller, professor at the University of Berkeley, and created using a new atomic sensor based on quantum interferometry. Using atoms cooled and trapped with a system of laser beams, researchers have managed for the first time to precisely measure the gravitational attraction exerted on atoms by a small mass, on the order of a centimeter in size, at distances of a few millimeters.

The new atomic sensor developed for this experiment and the results obtained have prospects on the measurement of gravitational force at sub-millimeter distances, on the search for possible forms of dark energy, on the study of the Aharonov-Bohm gravitational effect and on the search for quantum properties of gravity.

Read the complete article on unifimagazine at the following link