On the quantum nature of gravity

The prize, assigned by the Gravity Research Foundation for the 70th time this year, awards the best and most well-written essays about gravitation, its theory, applications or effects. The contest, which awards prizes of up to $4,000, has been won by five people who won the Nobel Prize in physics.

The awarded essay "Information Content of the Gravitational Field of a Quantum Superposition" considers the quantum aspects of gravitation. In fact, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are pillars of modern physics, but we still lack a satisfactory phenomenological basis for a theory of quantum gravity that reconciles these two theories. The authors of the essay work in this direction, arguing that a gravitational field must be capable of carrying quantum information, and therefore gravity has quantum nature. Alessio Belenchia, former member of IQOQI-Vienna and first author of the awarded essay, says "our analysis supports the view that experiments testing entanglement of systems interacting via gravity do probe the quantum nature of gravity".

For the awarded essay please see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.04496v1.pdf