Gravitons, the particles thought to carry gravity, have never been seen in space – but something very similar has been detected in a semiconductor.
Physicists have been searching for gravitons, the hypothetical particles thought to carry gravity, for decades. These have never been detected in space, but graviton-like particles have now been seen in a semiconductor. Using these to understand gravitons’ behaviour could help unite the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which have long been at odds.
“This is a needle in a haystack [finding]. And the paper that started this whole thing is from way back in 1993,” says Loren Pfeiffer at Princeton University. He wrote that paper with several colleagues including Aron Pinczuk, who passed away in 2022 before they could find hints of the elusive particles. READ MORE...
A research team led by Chinese scientists has provided the first experimental evidence hinting at the existence of gravitons, theoretical particles believed to mediate the force of gravity, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
This discovery marks a significant step towards bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity, two pillars of modern physics that have remained largely incompatible.
The research, carried out by a collaboration between scientists from Nanjing University in eastern China, the United States, and Germany, involved placing a thin layer of semiconductor under extreme conditions.
By cooling the semiconductor to near absolute zero and applying a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, the team managed to excite the semiconductor’s electrons to move in unison. This collective motion caused the electrons to spin in a manner consistent with predictions about gravitons, despite not confirming the particle’s direct existence.
“Our work has shown the first experimental substantiation of gravitons in condensed matter since the elusive particle was conceptualized in the 1930s,” Du Lingjie, the study’s lead author from Nanjing University, told state news agency Xinhua, as reported by SCMP. READ MORE...
