Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

It's not easy to directly test a theory of quantum gravity.

You need to be able to probe the super tiny plonk scale where quantum gravitational

effects appear. For that, you'd need a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way. So what

do you do? Look at it a different way. That's next.

Quantum Magazine is an editorially independent online publication supported by the Simon's Foundation to enhance public understanding of science.

In a small lab outside Palo Alto, Stanford University professor Monica Schleyer-Smith and her team are coming at quantum gravity from a different angle.

Physicists have been suggesting for over a decade that gravity, and even space-time itself, may emerge from a strange quantum connection called entanglement. Schleyer Smith and her collaborators are reverse engineering the process.

They're engineering highly entangled quantum systems in a tabletop experiment.

Schleyer Smith hopes to produce something that looks and acts like the

warped space-time predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. In a paper posted

this summer, her team announced their first experimental step along this route. It's a system of

atoms trapped by light, with connections

made to order, finely controlled with magnetic fields. When tuned in the right way, the long-distance

correlations in this system describe a tree-like geometry. They're similar to one seen in simple

models of emergent space time.

Slyersmith and her colleagues hope to build on this work to create analogs to more complex

geometries, including those of black holes. This could be the most promising route for putting

the latest ideas about quantum gravity to the test.

For five decades, the prevailing theory of particle physics, the standard model, has been a beacon

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