A complete analysis of spin coherence in the full-loop Stern Gerlach interferometer using non-squeezed and squeezed coherent states of the Quantum harmonic oscillator
Over the years, quite a few proposals have been put forward by various groups to exploit the Stern-Gerlach effect to create stable macroscopic spatial superpositions between micron-sized neutral test masses over appreciably long time scales. One such proposal put forward by Bose et al. and co-workers in 2017 uses this idea to show that two masses cannot be gravitationally entangled if not for the presence of a quantum coherent mediator. A key aspect of this approach involves the measure of the visibility of the SG-interferometer, a quantity that provides an estimate of the degree of spin coherence that is conserved over the total interferometric time after the wave-packets are combined in both, position and momentum space. A successful implementation of this idea however requires the knowledge of several experimental parameters. To this end, we present a rigorous mathematical analysis for the visibility in a general SG interferometer for non-squeezed and squeezed thermal coherent states of the Quantum harmonic oscillator. Additionally, we derive constraints on the temperature of the initially prepared wave-packet of the test mass required for both, the non-squeezed and squeezed coherent states. We show that for wave-packet split sizes of the order of microns, masses of the order of 1.0e-14 - 1.0e-15 kg can be used to realize such a proposal for time intervals as high as 0.5 seconds. Our results show that for the squeezed case, the temperatures required can be scaled up by several orders of magnitude (as opposed to the non-squeezed case) if one considers a squeezing in the momentum space of the initially prepared wave-packet.