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Electronic Detection Of Gravitational Disturbances And Collective Coulomb Interactions, A Widom, D. Drosdoff, S. Sivasubramanian, Y. Srivastava

Allan Widom

The cross section for a gravitational wave antenna to absorb a graviton may be directly expressed in terms of the non-local viscous response function of the metallic crystal. Crystal viscosity is dominated by electronic processes which then also dominate the graviton absorption rate. To compute this rate from a microscopic Hamiltonian, one must include the full Coulomb interaction in the Maxwell electric field pressure and also allow for strongly non-adiabatic transitions in the electronic kinetic pressure. The view that the electrons and phonons constitute ideal gases with a weak electron phonon interaction is not sufficiently accurate for estimating the full …