Laboratory-Scale Superconducting Mirrors for Gravitational Microwaves

Abstract

When a gravitational wave at microwave frequencies impinges on a thin, type I superconducting film, the radical delocalization of the film's negatively charged Cooper pairs, which is due to the Uncertainty Principle, causes them to undergo non-geodesic motion relative to the geodesic motion of the decohered, positively charged ions in the film's lattice, which is due to the Equivalence Principle. The ensuing charge separation leads to a virtual plasma excitation. This "Heisenberg-Coulomb" effect enormously enhances the interaction of a gravitational wave with a superconductor relative to that of normal matter, so that the wave will be reflected even from a very thin superconducting film. This result is presented using the BCS theory and a superconducting plasma model.