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Physics 2015
Probing the noncommutative structure of space with a quantum harmonic oscillator driven by gravitational waveAbstract: We investigate the quantum mechanical transitions, induced by the combined effect of Gravitational wave (GW) and noncommutative (NC) structure of space, among the states of a 2-dimensional harmonic oscillator. The phonon modes excited by the passing GW within the resonant bar-detector are formally identical to forced harmonic oscillator and they represent a length variation of roughly the same order of magnitude as the characteristic length-scale of spatial noncommutativity estimated from the phenomenological upper bound of the NC parameter. This motivates our present work. We employ a number of different GW wave-forms that are typically expected from possible astronomical sources. We find that the transition probablities are quite sensitive to the nature of polarization of the GW. We further elaborate on the particular type of sources of GW radiation which can induce transitions that can be used as effective probe of the spatial noncommutative structure.
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