Researchers have measured gravity using the effects of time dilation.
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity. This image is an artist's depiction of colliding black holes causing gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time.with a contraption made of lead spheres, wooden rods and wire. In the 21st century, scientists are doing something very similar with rather more sophisticated tools: atoms.
Gravity might be an early subject in introductory physics classes, but that doesn't mean scientists aren't still trying to measure it with ever-increasing precision. Now, a group of physicists has done it using the effects of— the slowing of time caused by increased velocity or gravitational force — on atoms. In a paper published online today in the journal Science, the researchers announce that they've been able to measure the curvature of space-time.
The experiment is part of an area of science called atom interferometry. It takes advantage of a principle of : just as a light wave can be represented as a particle, a particle can be represented as a"wave packet." And just as light waves can overlap and create interference, so too can matter wave packets. In particular, if an atom's wave packet is split in two, allowed to do something, and then recombined, the waves might not line up anymore — in other words, their phases have changed.
"One tries to extract useful information from this phase shift," Albert Roura, a physicist at the Institute of Quantum Technologies in Ulm, Germany, who was not involved in the new study, told Space.com. Roura
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