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arXiv · 2508.06171

Planckian bound on IR/UV mixing from cold-atom interferometry

Giovanni Amelino-Camelia·Giuseppe Fabiano·Domenico Frattulillo·Flavio Mercati
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Abstract

IR/UV mixing (a mechanism causing ultraviolet quantum-gravity effects to manifest themselves also in a far-infrared regime) is a rare case of feature found in several approaches to the quantum-gravity problem. We here derive the implications for "soft" IR/UV mixing (corrections to the dispersion relation that are linear in momentum) of some recent cold-atom-interferometry measurements. For both signs of the IR/UV-mixing correction term we establish bounds on the characteristic length scale which reach the Planck-length milestone. Intriguingly, for values of the characteristic scale of about half the Planck length we find that IR/UV mixing provides a solution for a puzzling discrepancy between Cesium-based and Rubidium-based atom-interferometric measurements of the fine structure constant.

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Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Giuseppe Fabiano, Domenico Frattulillo, Flavio Mercati. 2025-08-08. Planckian bound on IR/UV mixing from cold-atom interferometry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06171

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