Regular Article

Colored collapse models from the non-interferometric perspective^★

¹ Department of Physics, University of Trieste, Strada Costiera 11, 34151 Trieste, Italy
² Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Trieste Section, Via Valerio 2, 34127 Trieste, Italy
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

^a e-mail: matteo.carlesso@ts.infn.it
^b e-mail: l.ferialdi@soton.ac.uk

Received: 25 May 2018
Published online: 18 September 2018

Abstract

Models of spontaneous wave function collapse describe the quantum-to-classical transition by assuming a progressive breakdown of the superposition principle when the mass of the system increases, providing a well-defined phenomenology in terms of a non-linearly and stochastically modified Schrödinger equation, which can be tested experimentally. The most popular of such models is the continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) model: in its original version, the collapse is driven by a white noise, and more recently, generalizations in terms of colored noises, which are more realistic, have been formulated. We will analyze how current non-interferometric tests bound the model, depending on the spectrum of the noise. We will find that low frequency purely mechanical experiments provide the most stable and strongest bounds.