Gravity-induced interference and continuous quantum measurements

Gravity-induced quantum interference is a remarkable effect that has already been confirmed experimentally, and it is a phenomenon in which quantum mechanics and gravity play simultaneously an important role. Additionally, a generalized version of this interference experiment could offer the possibility to confront against measurement outputs one of the formalisms that claim to give an explanation to the so called quantum measurement problem, namely the restricted path integral formalism. In this work we will analyze a possible extension of Colella, Overhauser, and Werner experiment and find that in the context of the restricted path integral formalism we obtain new interference terms that could be measured in an extended version of this experimental construction. These new terms not only show, as in the first experiment, that at the quantum level gravity is not a purely geometric effect, it still depends on mass, but also show that interference does depend on some parameters that appear in the restricted path integral formalism, thus offering the possibility to have a testing framework for its theoretical predictions. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.