A One-sided Witness for the Quantumness of Gravitational Dynamics

Abstract

Quantum information concepts and quantum technologies have opened the prospect to probe quantum gravity in table-top experiments. Many proposals rely on witnessing entanglement generation as a means to probe whether gravity is a quantum channel. Here we formulate a different and conclusive indirect test of the quantum nature of the gravitational interaction. Our witness is based on the concept of verifiable quantum memory in the dynamics of a quantum system. This allows us to assess the quantumness of an interaction between two systems by local measurements on one subsystem only. Our approach enables the first one-sided verification of the quantum nature of gravity, and provides a quantum signature of the interaction that is not fully covered by existing proposals. Our results open novel ways to witnessing the quantum nature of gravity in table-top experiments and clarify how {decisive tests can be designed even with measurements on only the probe system