MG12 - Talk detail
 

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Abstract

The far infrared region of the standard model vacuum as a possible gravity analogue.

It has been argued by many authors that the space-time curvature observed in gravitatinal field might emerge from the dynamical properties of the physical flat-space vacuum in some hydrodynamic limit. To exploit the implications of this idea and construct a definite model of gravity, one could start from the physical vacuum, modeled as a Bose condensate of elementary quanta, and look for vacuum excitations that, on a coarse grained scale, resemble the Newtonian potential. In this way, it is relatively easy to match the first approximation to the line element of General Relativity or of some of its possible variants. As an underlying physical mechanism, I consider ultraweak scalar fluctuations in the far infrared region of the standard model vacuum (details in arXiv:0904.1272[gr-qc]).

Vacuum structure and ether-drift experiments

In the data of the ether-drift experiments there might be sizeable fluctuations superposed on the smooth sinusoidal modulations due to the Earth's rotation and orbital revolution. These fluctuations might reflect the stochastic nature of the underlying "quantum ether" and produce vanishing averages for all vectorial quantities extracted from a naive Fourier analysis of the data. By comparing the typical stability limits of the individual optical resonators with the amplitude of their relative frequency shift, the presently observed signal, rather than being spurious experimental noise, might also express fundamental properties of a physical vacuum similar to a superfluid in a turbulent state of motion. In this sense, the situation might be similar to the discovery of the CMBR that was first interpreted as mere instrumental noise (details in arXiv:0905.1815 [physics.gen-ph]).

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