Universal Description of Decoherence in Scale-Invariant Environments
Abstract
When a quantum system couples to a scale-invariant environment, what form must its decoherence take? We prove that the answer is unique: under locality, Lorentz invariance, unitarity, and continuous scale invariance, the effect of any such environment is mathematically equivalent to that of an \emph{unparticle bath} -- a scale-invariant continuum of states -- characterized entirely by the scaling dimension of the coupled operator. This is not a modelling choice but a consequence of conformal symmetry. All decoherence and dissipation exponents are fixed by through exact consistency relations, providing falsifiable predictions independent of microscopic details. We validate the framework using multi-channel transport data from the unitary Fermi gas, where two genuinely independent observables yield a consistent . We further show that quantum Ising criticality, inflationary cosmology, and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos -- spanning more than 25 orders of magnitude in energy -- are unified as specific realizations of the same structure. A decoherence phase transition at , where quantum coherence is \emph{protected} rather thandestroyed at long times, is a qualitative prediction inaccessible to any memoryless dynamical description.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.15445,
title = {Universal Description of Decoherence in Scale-Invariant Environments},
author = {Carlos Argüelles and Gabriela Barenboim and Gonzalo Herrera and Tanvi Krishnan and Héctor Sanchis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15445},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
8 pages, 2 figures