Quantum Sensing of Gravitational Frame Dragging with a Superfluid ^{4}He Gyrometer.

Authors

Kai-Isaak Ellers, Marios Christodoulou, K C Schwab, K Birgitta Whaley

Published in

Physical review letters. Volume 137. Issue 12. Pages 121404. Sep 18, 2026.

Abstract

We propose a laboratory-scale experiment to locally measure the general relativistic frame-dragging effect on Earth using the macroscopic quantum properties of a novel superfluid ^{4}He single Josephson junction gyrometer. We derive the frame-dragging and related geodetic and Thomas effects in the superfluid gyrometer and present a procedure for their experimental measurement. We compute the expected thermal noise floor and find that very high sensitivity can be expected at millikelvin temperatures, where near-future Josephson junctions using nanoporous 2D materials are expected to operate. Assuming utilization of the lowest-mechanical-loss materials, we find a noise spectral density of 5×10^{-17}  rads/s/sqrt[Hz] at 10 mK, which is sufficient to resolve the frame-dragging rate to 0.2% within one second of measurement, giving a rotational sensitivity of 1 revolution in 4 Byrs. This extreme sensitivity to rotation corresponds to a measurement of proper time differences as small as 10^{-35}  s.

PMID:
42826968
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 03 Oct 2026.

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