Related papers: Universal decoherence due to gravitational time di…
We investigate decoherence of quantum superpositions induced by gravitational time dilation and spontaneous emission between two atomic levels. It has been shown that gravitational time dilation can be an universal decoherence source. Here,…
There has been considerable interest over the past years in investigating the role of gravity in quantum phenomenon such as entanglement and decoherence. In particular, gravitational time dilation is believed to decohere superpositions of…
Real world quantum systems are open to perpetual influence from the wider environment. Quantum gravitational fluctuations provide a most fundamental source of the environmental influence through their universal interactions with all forms…
Recent work has shown that relativistic time dilation results in correlations between a particle's internal and external degrees of freedom, leading to decoherence of the latter. In this note, we briefly summarize the results and address…
Despite the fact that we have some proposals for the quantum theory of gravity like string theory or loop quantum gravity, we do not have any experimental evidence supporting any of these theories. Actually, we do not have experimental…
We discuss effects of loss of coherence in low energy quantum systems caused by or related to gravitation, referred to as gravitational decoherence. These effects, resulting from random metric fluctuations, for instance, promise to be…
A small quantum system within the gravitational field of a massive body will be entangled with the quantum degrees of freedom of the latter. Hence, the massive body acts as an environment, and it induces non-unitary dynamics, noise, and…
We present a simple calculation leading to the quantum gravitationally-induced decoherence of a spatial superposition of a massive object in the linear coupling regime. The point of this calculation is to illustrate that the…
According to relativity, the reading of an ideal clock is interpreted as the elapsed proper time along its classical trajectory through spacetime. In contrast, quantum theory allows the association of many simultaneous trajectories with a…
Understanding the interplay between quantum mechanical systems and gravity is a crucial step towards unifying these two fundamental ideas. Recent theoretical developments have explored how global properties of spacetime would cause a…
The fact that gravitational environments cannot be shielded (since gravity is universal) makes them of great theoretical interest to decoherence mechanisms and to the quantum-to-classical transition. While past results seemed to indicate…
It is believed that classical behavior emerges in a quantum system due to decoherence. It has also been proposed that gravity can be a source of this decoherence. We examine this in detail by studying a number of quantum systems, including…
We consider environment induced decoherence of quantum superpositions to mixtures in the limit in which that process is much faster than any competing one generated by the Hamiltonian $H_{\rm sys}$ of the isolated system. While the golden…
It has recently been proposed that quantum gravity might lead to the decoherence of superpositions in energy, corresponding to a discretization of time at the Planck scale. At first sight the proposal seems amenable to experimental…
A small quantum system is studied which is a superposition of states localized in different positions in a static gravitational field. The time evolution of the correlation between different positions is investigated, and it is seen that…
Decoherence induced by coupling a system with an environment may display universal features. Here we demostrate that when the coupling to the system drives a quantum phase transition in the environment, the temporal decay of quantum…
Emergent quantum technologies have led to increasing interest in decoherence - the processes that limit the appearance of quantum effects and turn them into classical phenomena. One important cause of decoherence is the interaction of a…
Decoherence describes the tendency of quantum sub-systems to dynamically lose their quantum character. This happens when the quantum sub-system of interest interacts and becomes entangled with an environment that is traced out. For ordinary…
Using the relativistic concept of time dilation we show that a superposition of gravitational potentials can lead to nonunitary time evolution. For sufficiently weak gravitational potentials one can still define, for all intents and…
Recently, a static gravitational field, such as that of the Earth, was proposed as a new source of decoherence [1]. We study the conditions under which it becomes the dominant decoherence effect in typical interferometric experiments. The…