Photon Correlations Ignore Graviton Statistics, CERN Physicists Find

CERN physicists have demonstrated that photon correlations within a closed optical resonator are unexpectedly insensitive to the statistical properties of gravitons. Building on the Hanbury-Brown Twiss effect, a technique developed through experiments in the 1950s, the research team analyzed how these photon correlations respond to the hypothetical particles mediating gravity. The work reveals that the super-Poissonian statistics expected from these gravitons cannot be inferred from photon measurements, even in principle. Unlike gravitational waves from massive objects, the source of these gravitons isn’t massive objects, but rather zero-point fluctuations of the gravitational…