Could dark energy be measured in the lab?

Abstract

The experimentally measured spectral density of current noise in Josephson junctions provides direct evidence for the existence of zero-point fluctuations. Assuming that the total vacuum energy associated with these fluctuations cannot exceed the presently measured dark energy of the universe, we predict an upper cutoff frequency of nu_c=(1.69 +- 0.05) x 10^12 Hz for the measured frequency spectrum of zero-point fluctuations in the Josephson junction. The largest frequencies that have been reached in the experiments are of the same order of magnitude as nu_c and provide a lower bound on the dark energy density of the universe. It is shown that suppressed zero-point fluctuations above a given cutoff frequency can lead to 1/f noise. We propose an experiment which may help to measure some of the properties of dark energy in the lab.

Replaced by final version accepted by Phys. Lett. B. 5 pages, 1 figure. additional text on the physical interpretation of the measured noise spectrum in Fig.1, more references added, Title has slightly changed