Gravitational induced phase effects are investigated in neutron interferometry for testing the validity of the Newtonian potential

在大型中子干涉仪上系统地研究中子上产生的引力相。在完美晶体干涉仪中，单个中子在宏观上被分开了几厘米，并且随着一条路径高于另一条路径的高度而经历相移。但迄今为止测量到的相移比预期低约1%。由于引力相移随干涉仪尺寸的增大而增大，新一代大型中子干涉仪对引力的灵敏度将大大提高。我们的目标是在一个宏观分离的极轻亚原子量子物体上验证牛顿万有引力定律。通过精确测量完美晶体中硅在不同晶格反射下的相干散射长度，将利用相同的装置来感知假设的非牛顿短程相互作用。我们装置的一个特点是对亚微米相互作用的敏感性。这还有一个额外的好处，即同时获得了中子-电子散射长度的精确测量。

Gravitational phases induced on the neutron shall systematically be investigated in large neutron interferometers. In the perfect crystal interferometer, a single neutron is macroscopically separated by several centimetres and experiences phase shifts depending on the height of one path above the other. But the hitherto measured phase shifts are approximately 1% lower than expected. As the gravitational phase shift increases with the interferometer size the new generation of large neutron interferometers will be much more sensitive to gravitation. Our aim is the verification of the Newtonian gravitation law for a macroscopically separated very light sub-atomar quantum object. The same setup will be exploited for sensing hypothetic non-Newtonian short-range interactions by accurately measuring the coherent scattering length of silicon in a perfect crystal at different lattice reflections. A special feature of our setup is the sensitivity to the submicron interaction regime. This has the additional benefit that simultaneously a precision measurement of the neutron-electron scattering length is obtained.