249 research outputs found
Does an atom interferometer test the gravitational redshift at the Compton frequency ?
Atom interferometers allow the measurement of the acceleration of freely
falling atoms with respect to an experimental platform at rest on Earth's
surface. Such experiments have been used to test the universality of free fall
by comparing the acceleration of the atoms to that of a classical freely
falling object. In a recent paper, M\"uller, Peters and Chu [Nature {\bf 463},
926-929 (2010)] argued that atom interferometers also provide a very accurate
test of the gravitational redshift when considering the atom as a clock
operating at the Compton frequency associated with the rest mass. We analyze
this claim in the frame of general relativity and of different alternative
theories. We show that the difference of "Compton phases" between the two paths
of the interferometer is actually zero in a large class of theories, including
general relativity, all metric theories of gravity, most non-metric theories
and most theoretical frameworks used to interpret the violations of the
equivalence principle. Therefore, in most plausible theoretical frameworks,
there is no redshift effect and atom interferometers only test the universality
of free fall. We also show that frameworks in which atom interferometers would
test the redshift pose serious problems, such as (i) violation of the Schiff
conjecture, (ii) violation of the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum
mechanics and of the principle of least action for matter waves, (iii)
violation of energy conservation, and more generally (iv) violation of the
particle-wave duality in quantum mechanics. Standard quantum mechanics is no
longer valid in such frameworks, so that a consistent interpretation of the
experiment would require an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics. As
such an alternative has not been proposed to date, we conclude that the
interpretation of atom interferometers as testing the gravitational redshift is
unsound.Comment: 26 pages. Modified version to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit
Atom interferometry and the Einstein equivalence principle
The computation of the phase shift in a symmetric atom interferometer in the
presence of a gravitational field is reviewed. The difference of action-phase
integrals between the two paths of the interferometer is zero for any
Lagrangian which is at most quadratic in position and velocity. We emphasize
that in a large class of theories of gravity the atom interferometer permits a
test of the weak version of the equivalence principle (or universality of free
fall) by comparing the acceleration of atoms with that of ordinary bodies, but
is insensitive to that aspect of the equivalence principle known as the
gravitational redshift or universality of clock rates.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the "46th Rencontres de
Moriond and GPhyS Colloquium on Gravitational Waves and Experimental
Gravity", la Thuile, March 20-27, 201
Appliance Management for Federated Cloud Environments
International audienceCloud infrastructures provide compelling features for scientific and engineering applications. Federated clouds additionally promise improved scalability via access to a larger pool of resources and improved service availability through geographically distributed redundant servers. Effective use of federated clouds requires the creation of portable appliances and consistent appliance management techniques. The StratusLab Marketplace, a platform-agnostic appliance registry, facilitates appliance management in a federated environment. This paper describes the Marketplace design goals, implementation, and security concerns. It also covers the planned improvements based on our experience of running this service in production for more than two years
Operation of Site Running StratusLab toolkit v1.0
This document reports on one of the significant project milestones concerning the operation of a cloud site running StratusLab's cloud distribution (or toolkit). It is currently running v0.3 of the StratusLab distribution-a beta release of the upcoming 1.0 production release. In particular it presents the WP5 reference cloud service, the evolution of the service up to Month 10 of the project, and the way this service has been exploited to date. A major milestone regarding the exploitation has been the deployment of the first virtualized production grid site running on the project's reference cloud service
Grid technology for biomedical applications
International audienceThe deployment of biomedical applications in a grid environment has started about three years ago in several European projects and national ini-tiatives. These applications have demonstrated that the grid paradigm was rele-vant to the needs of the biomedical community. They have also highlighted that this community had very specific requirements on middleware and needed fur-ther structuring in large collaborations in order to participate to the deployment of grid infrastructures in the coming years. In this paper, we propose several ar-eas where grid technology can today improve research and healthcare. A cru-cial issue is to maximize the cross fertilization among projects in the perspec-tive of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors of healthcare, the physicians, the health-care centres and administrations, and of course the citizens
Final Report on the Evaluation of StratusLab Products
Over the course of the project, the project's software releases have been evaluated against identified requirements and against the needs of real users. Most of the formal requirements have been satisfied, with work in the second year concentrating on extentions to commercial applications, multi-platform support and sandboxing. Feedback from applications running on the StratusLab cloud can be grouped into four broad categories: Ease of Use, Integration & Operation, Better Informaton Flow, and High-Level Services. These categories provide a broad roadmap for the evolution of the StratusLab cloud distribution past the end of the project
CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications
Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy
complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud
resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While
there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network
controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no
well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with
multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE
architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open,
unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications,
tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major
challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the
Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is
implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case
Final Report on StratusLab Adoption
The StratusLab cloud distribution has been adopted by users from a wide range of scientific disciplines: astrophysics, software engineering, machine learning, high- energy physics, meteorology, and bioinformatics. In addition, there has been commercial update of the distribution for a turnkey private cloud solution aimed at SMEs and a large public deployment by Atos within the Helix Nebula initiative. Both partner and non-partner institutes have used the StratusLab distribution to provide cloud services to their users
Testing the Gravitational Redshift with Atomic Gravimeters?
Atom interferometers allow the measurement of the acceleration of freely
falling atoms with respect to an experimental platform at rest on Earth's
surface. Such experiments have been used to test the universality of free fall
by comparing the acceleration of the atoms to that of a classical freely
falling object. In a recent paper, M\"uller, Peters and Chu [Nature {\bf 463},
926-929 (2010)] argued that atom interferometers also provide a very accurate
test of the gravitational redshift (or universality of clock rates).
Considering the atom as a clock operating at the Compton frequency associated
with the rest mass, they claimed that the interferometer measures the
gravitational redshift between the atom-clocks in the two paths of the
interferometer at different values of gravitational potentials. In the present
paper we analyze this claim in the frame of general relativity and of different
alternative theories, and conclude that the interpretation of atom
interferometers as testing the gravitational redshift at the Compton frequency
is unsound. The present work is a summary of our extensive paper [Wolf et al.,
arXiv:1012.1194, Class. Quant. Grav. 28, 145017, (2011)], to which the reader
is referred for more details.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the joint European Time and
Frequency Forum and IEEE Frequency Control Symposium, 2011. Summary of the
extensive paper arXiv:1012.1194, Class. Quant. Grav. 28, 145017, (2011
Reply to the comment on: "Does an atom interferometer test the gravitational redshift at the Compton frequency?"
Hohensee, Chu, Peters and M\"uller have submitted a comment (arXiv:1112.6039
[gr-qc]) on our paper "Does an atom interferometer test the gravitational
redshift at the Compton frequency?", Classical and Quantum Gravity 28, 145017
(2011), arXiv:1009.2485 [gr-qc]. Here we reply to this comment and show that
the main result of our paper, namely that atom interferometric gravimeters do
not test the gravitational redshift at the Compton frequency, remains valid.Comment: To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit
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