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Combining gravity with quantum mechanics remains one of the biggest challenges of physics. In the past years, experiments with opto-mechanical systems have been proposed that may give indirect clues about the quantum nature of gravity. In a recent variation of such tests [D. Carney et al., Phys.Rev.X Quantum 2, 030330 (2021)], the authors propose to gravitationally entangle an atom interferometer with a mesoscopic oscillator. The interaction results in periodic drops and revivals of the interferometeric visibility, which under specific assumptions indicate the gravitational generation of entanglement. Here we study semi-classical models of the atom interferometer that can reproduce the same effect. We show that the core signature -- periodic collapses and revivals of the visibility -- can appear if the atom is subject to a random unitary channel, including the case where the oscillator is fully classical and situations even without explicit modelling of the oscillator. We also show that the non-classicality of the oscillator vanishes unless the system is very close to its ground state, and even when the system is in the ground state, the non-classicality is limited by the coupling strength. Our results thus indicate that deducing entanglement from the proposed experiment is very challenging, since fulfilling and verifying the non-classicality assumptions is a significant challenge on its own right., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure

We demonstrate a simple, robust, and contactless method for nondestructive testing of magnetic materials such as steel. This uses a fiber-coupled magnetic sensor based on nitrogen-vacancy centers (NVCs) in diamond without magnetic shielding. Previous NVC magnetometry has sought a homogeneous bias magnetic field on the diamond to improve the sensitivity. In contrast, here we show that the spatial resolution for imaging is improved by applying an inhomogeneous magnetic field to the steel even though this leads to an inhomogeneous magnetic field on the diamond. Structural damage in the steel distorts the inhomogeneous magnetic field and by detecting this distortion we reconstruct the damage profile through quantifying the shifts in the NVC Zeeman splitting. With a 1-mm magnet as the source of our inhomogeneous magnetic field, we achieve a high spatial resolution of 1 mm in the plane parallel and 0.1 mm in the direction perpendicular to the surface of the steel. This works even when the steel is covered by a nonmagnetic material. The lift-off distance of our sensor head from the surface of 316 stainless steel is up to 3 mm.

Understanding gravity in the framework of quantum mechanics is one of the great challenges in modern physics. Along this line, a prime question is to find whether gravity is a quantum entity subject to the rules of quantum mechanics. It is fair to say that there are no feasible ideas yet to test the quantum coherent behaviour of gravity directly in a laboratory experiment. Here, we introduce an idea for such a test based on the principle that two objects cannot be entangled without a quantum mediator. We show that despite the weakness of gravity, the phase evolution induced by the gravitational interaction of two micron size test masses in adjacent matter-wave interferometers can detectably entangle them even when they are placed far apart enough to keep Casimir-Polder forces at bay. We provide a prescription for witnessing this entanglement, which certifies gravity as a quantum coherent mediator, through simple correlation measurements between two spins: one embedded in each test mass. Fundamentally, the above entanglement is shown to certify the presence of non-zero off-diagonal terms in the coherent state basis of the gravitational field modes., Comment: 7 pages