ARIZONA CAMPUS
Student Researchers Make Quantum Leaps The new frontier of physics is infinitesimally small. But exciting discoveries are being made one micrometer at a time — even among some of the field’s most time-tested concepts, as an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University team has found.
“I think our work will benefit the physics industry as a whole. We’re working to learn and develop more science and physics, more than what we currently know. It’s what we all strive for — to contribute something to knowledge, even if it feels little.” Janessa Slone ’23 Space Physics After getting hooked on physics in high school and learning about the research opportunities at Embry-Riddle, Slone said Bailey sparked her interest in theoretical physics with his enthusiasm for general relativity. For this project, much of Slone’s responsibilities consisted of checking the team’s work, which she said provided great satisfaction — especially when her work confirmed theirs. Slone wants to continue studying theoretical physics and has applied to various graduate schools around the country with hopes of one day working for NASA or the National Laboratories. The research team also included doctoral candidate Kellie O’Neal-Ault and Space Physics graduate Jennifer James (’22), who is now pursuing her Ph.D. in physics.
“What we are doing is testing gravity,” said Quentin Bailey, professor of Space Physics at Embry-Riddle’s Prescott Campus. “We want to see if the laws of gravity according to Newton and Einstein still hold true at very small scales.” Isaac Newton’s universal law of gravitation explains gravity as a force of attraction between all matter. But scientists in the centuries since Newton have begun to wonder if the physics that apply to apples and planets can change at the very smallest levels. Over the past two years, Bailey led a team of undergraduate research students on a mission to discover what Newton never had a chance to test: How do the rules of gravity apply at the quantum level? Their findings have recently been published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Based on the team’s experiments, gravitational forces appear to behave the same at micrometer distances as they do on a huge, universal scale. But many physicists like Bailey are interested to see if this holds at smaller, unexplored distances. “We don’t know much about gravity at very small distances,” Bailey said. “We know it works on planetary scales and larger scales, like solar system and galaxy scales, and even larger scales comparable to the size of the universe.” Exploring these questions was exactly what student researcher Janessa Slone (’23) wanted to do, and she was thrilled to get the chance while still an undergraduate.
PUBLISHED The paper authored by Bailey, Slone, James and O’Neal-Ault is called “Short-range forces due to Lorentz-symmetry violation” and was published in January 2023. HANDS-ON DAY ONE Embry-Riddle undergraduates are given unique opportunities to take part in high-level faculty-sponsored research projects thanks to grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, among others, along with support from Embry-Riddle’s Undergraduate Research Institute.
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