Related papers: General Relativistic Decoherence with Applications…
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…
It is of great interest to explore matter in nontrivial quantum arrangements, including Schrodinger cat-like states. Such states are sensitive to decoherence from their environment. Recently, in Ref. [1] we computed the rate of decoherence…
Although various pieces of indirect evidence about the nature of dark matter have been collected, its direct detection has eluded experimental searches despite extensive effort. If the mass of dark matter is below 1 MeV, it is essentially…
A new frontier in the search for dark matter (DM) is based on the idea of detecting the decoherence caused by DM scattering against a mesoscopic superposition of normal matter. Such superpositions are uniquely sensitive to very small…
I demonstrate a simple example of how the time series obtained from searches for ultralight bosonic dark matter (DM), such as the axion, can be used to determine whether it is in a coherent or incoherent quantum state. The example is…
Decoherence is the process via which quantum superpositions states are reduced to classical mixtures. Decoherence has been predicted for relativistically accelerated quantum systems, however examples to date have involved restricting the…
It is known that a macroscopic quantum superposition (MQS), when it is exposed to environment, decoheres at a rate scaling with the separation of its component states in phase space. This is more or less consistent with the well known…
The physics of low-energy quantum systems is usually studied without explicit consideration of the background spacetime. Phenomena inherent to quantum theory on curved space-time, such as Hawking radiation, are typically assumed to be only…
Dark Matter (DM) is an elusive form of matter which has been postulated to explain astronomical observations through its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies, gravitational lensing of light around these, and through its imprint on…
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…
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…
The dephasing influence of a dissipative environment reduces linear superpositions of macroscopically distinct quantum states (sometimes also called Schr\"odinger cat states) usually almost immediately to a statistical mixture. This process…
The high resilience to de-coherence shown by a recently discovered Macroscopic Quantum Superposition (MQS) involving a number of photons in excess of 5 x 10^4 motivates the present theoretical and numerical investigation. The results are…
The local solar gravitational potential forms a basin for ultralight dark matter (ULDM), with discrete energy levels. Even if barely populated, it introduces a new characteristic timescale in DM dynamics. This necessitates a generalization…
We analyse a decoherence effect, caused by the gravitational interaction between a massive body and the electromagnetic field. Assuming a quantum version of the light bending interaction, we show that it leads to decoherence of the mass if…
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 show that if a massive body is put in a quantum superposition of spatially separated states, the mere presence of a black hole in the vicinity of the body will eventually destroy the coherence of the superposition. This occurs because,…
Quantum coherence is one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics rooted in the superposition principle. Recently it has been demonstrated that it is possible to harvest the quantum coherence from a coherent scalar field. In order…
There is mounting theoretical evidence that black hole horizons induce decoherence on a quantum system, say a particle, put in a superposition of locations, with the decoherence functional, evaluated after closure of the superposition,…
Some hypothetical particles are considered essentially undetectable because they are far too light and slow-moving to transfer appreciable energy or momentum to the normal matter that composes a detector. I propose instead directly…