We argue that the hypothesis of the gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter can be tested at the Ice Cube, a neutrino telescope, recently constructed at the South Pole. If there is such a gravitational repulsion, the gravitational field, deep inside the horizon of a black hole, might create neutrino-antineutrino pairs from the quantum vacuum. While neutrinos must stay confined inside the horizon, the antineutrinos should be violently ejected. Hence, a black hole (made from matter) should behave as a point-like source of antineutrinos. Our simplified calculations suggest, that the antineutrinos emitted by supermassive black holes in the centre of the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy, could be detected by the new generation of neutrino telescopes.
Deep Dive into Can the new Neutrino Telescopes reveal the Gravitational Properties of Antimatter?.
We argue that the hypothesis of the gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter can be tested at the Ice Cube, a neutrino telescope, recently constructed at the South Pole. If there is such a gravitational repulsion, the gravitational field, deep inside the horizon of a black hole, might create neutrino-antineutrino pairs from the quantum vacuum. While neutrinos must stay confined inside the horizon, the antineutrinos should be violently ejected. Hence, a black hole (made from matter) should behave as a point-like source of antineutrinos. Our simplified calculations suggest, that the antineutrinos emitted by supermassive black holes in the centre of the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy, could be detected by the new generation of neutrino telescopes.
The gravitational properties of antimatter are still not known. While everyone knows that an apple falls down, no one knows if an "anti-apple" would fall down or up. The answer on this question may come from the AEGIS experiment [1] at CERN, designed to compare the gravitational acceleration of atoms of hydrogen and antihydrogen. In this Letter we present an intriguing possibility: if antihydrogen falls up, the supermassive black holes should be emitters of antineutrinos, what may be observable with the new generation of neutrino telescopes (Ice Cube and KM3NeT).
Let us consider a hypothetical gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter (“antigravity”) defined through relations: 0 (1) Here, a symbol with a bar denotes antiparticles; while indices i and g refer to the inertial and gravitational mass (gravitational charge). The first two relations in (1) are experimental evidence [2,3], while the third one is the conjecture of antigravity which dramatically differs from the mainstream conviction 0 = g g m m
, implying (together with the Newton law of gravity) that matter and antimatter are mutually repulsive but self-attractive. Of course, our main premise
should be considered as a testable scientific speculation, not excluded by the existing experimental and observational evidence.
At first sight, it may be concluded, that in our Universe, apparently dominated by matter, the gravitational properties of antimatter are not important; the miniscule quantities of antimatter could not have any significant impact. However this naive point of view neglects the physical vacuum, in which, according to Quantum Field Theory, virtual matter and antimatter “appear” in equal quantities. Hence, the gravitational mass of the quantum vacuum (and thus the fate of the Universe) depends on the gravitational properties of antimatter.
Three major consequences of the conjecture (1) are: 1. A virtual particle-antiparticle pair is a system with zero gravitational mass. 2. A virtual pair may be considered as a virtual gravitational dipole. 3. A sufficiently strong gravitational field may create particle-antiparticle pairs from the quantum vacuum. The idea that antimatter has a negative gravitational charge is not new (For a review see Ref. [4]). What is completely new in our approach is the suggestion that the gravitational properties of antimatter determine the gravitational properties of the quantum vacuum and through the vacuum, antimatter has a major impact in astrophysics and cosmology.
In the present Letter we consider only the third of the above consequences with the particular interest in the creation of neutrino-antineutrino pairs deep inside the horizon of a supermassive black hole. However, it is worth to note, that the most important idea might be to consider the physical vacuum as a fluid of virtual gravitational dipoles and to study the vacuum polarization by an external gravitational field. Our work is in progress to understand if the phenomena, usually attributed to the hypothetical dark matter and dark energy, could be explained as a result of the quantum vacuum polarization by the gravitational field of the known baryonic matter.
As it was demonstrated by Schwinger [5] in the framework of Quantum Electrodynamics, a strong electric field E , greater than a critical value cr E , can create electron-positron pairs from the quantum vacuum. For instance, electron-positron pairs can be created in the vicinity of an artificial nucleus with more than 173 protons (see for instance Greiner at al. [6] or Ruffini et al. [7]).
In the case of an external (classical i.e. unquantized) constant and homogenous electric field E , the exact particle creation rate per unit volume and time is [5,6] ( )
where mc m ≡ denotes the reduced Compton wavelength corresponding to the particle with mass m . Let us observe that we have replaced the quotient of electric fields ; so that the result (2) could be used not only in the case of an electric field, but also in the case of antigravity.
The Schwinger mechanism is consequence of: (a) the complex structure of the physical vacuum in quantum field theories, and (b) the existence of an external field which attempts to separate particles and antiparticles. In the physical vacuum, short-living “virtual” particle-antiparticle pairs are continuously created and annihilated by quantum fluctuations (which are in fact possible because of Heisenberg uncertainty relation for time and energy). A “virtual” pair can be converted into a real pair only in the presence of a strong external field, which can spatially separate particles and antiparticles, by pushing them in opposite directions; as it does an electric field in the particular case of charged particles. If it is always an attractive force, as commonly believed today, gravity can’t separate particles and antiparticles. Hence, the conjectured gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter is a necessary condition for separ
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