Could dark energy be measured in the lab?

Beck, Christian; Mackey, Michael C.
Bibliographical reference

Physics Letters B, Volume 605, Issue 3-4, p. 295-300.

Advertised on:
1
2005
Number of authors
2
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
51
Refereed citations
32
Description
The experimentally measured spectral density of current noise in Josephson junctions provides direct evidence for the existence of zero-point fluctuations. Assuming that the total vacuum energy associated with these fluctuations cannot exceed the presently measured dark energy of the universe, we predict an upper cutoff frequency of νc=(1.69±0.05)×1012 Hz for the measured frequency spectrum of zero-point fluctuations in the Josephson junction. The largest frequencies that have been reached in the experiments are of the same order of magnitude as νc and provide a lower bound on the dark energy density of the universe. It is shown that suppressed zero-point fluctuations above a given cutoff frequency can lead to 1/f noise. We propose an experiment which may help to measure some of the properties of dark energy in the lab.