According to Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, the quantum vacuum is a bubbling chaos, giving rise to permanent quantum fluctuations. According to some physicists, quantum fluctuations of sufficient magnitude could bend light, creating a quantum gravitational microlensing effect.
Since the development of quantum mechanics and the work of Heisenberg, Hartman and Casimir, physicists have known that the quantum vacuum is a chaotic environment. Indeed, the energy of this one fluctuates permanently, creating pairs of particle-antiparticle of different energy. The explanation is initially given by Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle concerning time and energy:ΔE · Δt ≥ ℏ/2.
There are two types of fluctuations. First, the active fluctuations which are the fluctuations of spatio-temporal geometry itself. And second, passive fluctuations which are fluctuations in the energy-matter field affecting the metric. It is the latter that the study addresses.
Classically, it is considered that these fluctuations occur mainly at the Planck scale and are therefore unobservable. However, some of these fluctuations, whose energy is large or by accumulation effect may appear beyond the Planck scale, may be the cause of a gravitational microlensing phenomenon.
The physicist S. Carlip of the University of California demonstrates that under certain conditions of energy and size (the scale of appearance of the fluctuation must be greater than that of Planck), the fluctuations can be at the origin of gravitational micro-lenses. Unfortunately, the physicist also demonstrates that the lifetime of such fluctuations is extremely short (even almost instantaneous) and therefore does not allow this lensing effect to be observed.
Related topic:What are quantum vacuum fluctuations?
In the best case, this life time can be up to 10 -29 seconds. However, the appearance of fluctuations above the Planck scale is not so rare; in a sphere with volume 10 17 times greater than the Planck volume, these fluctuations can appear a certain number of times a day. Furthermore, if quantum gravitational microlensing phenomena cannot be observed, other effects may be.
Thus, Carlip shows that for a fluctuation greater than the Planck scale having a lifetime between 10 -38 and 10 -29 seconds, a light blur phenomenon can be observed depending on the wavelength (and therefore the energy) of the photons.
In addition, the fluctuations could be the cause of an equally observable Sachs-Wolfe effect. Several observations will have to be made to invalidate or confirm the findings of the study. However, this allows us to pose a new energy constraint for gravity models at the TeV scale, thus giving physicists the possibility of refining certain theories based on these models.
