Quantum states of neutrons in a gravitational field

Supervisor : Benoit Chalopin, lecturer, LCAR, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse.

In many fields of physics, when studying the motion of a particle at the microscopic scale, the gravitational interaction is led to be neglected in front of other interactions such as the electromagnetic interaction, or at shorter range the strong and weak interactions. Indeed, if we focus on the interactions between the proton and the electron forming a hydrogen atom, we can show that the gravitational interaction is 1040 times less than the electromagnetic interaction. However, at this scale, gravity can imply a quantum behavior that we have presented. During this presentation, we have approached the problem from a theoretical point of view before considering an experimental approach established by the GRANIT experiment.