Experimental Signatures of Operationally Regulated Gravitational Collapse: Phase Variance, Coherence Length, and Observational Discrimination

This paper is the fourth in a series on operational interpretations of gravitational divergences. The first paper established the limit-behavior interpretation of black hole singularities (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18114785). The second extended this to gravitational self-energy in quantum superpositions (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18314120). The third gave the framework its full mathematical form (doi:10.5281/zenodo.19066295). The present work derives the directly observable experimental signatures of that framework. The Operational Curvature Cutoff Principle (OCCP) predicts a minimum gravitational collapse timescale tau_min = sqrt(pi) * hbar * l_P / (G m^2), scaling as m^-2, in contrast to the Penrose-Diosi prediction tau proportional to m^-1. This paper derives: (i) the gravitational dephasing rate Gamma_phi = E_grav / hbar as the primary interferometric observable; (ii) the coherence length d_coh(m, T_exp) as the maximum accessible superposition separation, which saturates at the Planck scale; (iii) a two-dimensional experimental discrimination map over (mass, separation) parameter space; (iv) an inverse inference test in which the same observed timescale yields mass estimates differing by ~10^27 under OCCP vs. Penrose-Diosi, resolvable by a single independent mass measurement; (v) a dimensionless master curve demonstrating that the m^-2 scaling is universal across all mass distributions. All results are verified numerically using the companion simulator occp_simulator_v4.py (included as a supplementary file in this record), which produces twenty figures covering the full parameter space of the framework. Running the script requires only numpy, scipy, and matplotlib.