English

Sourcing semiclassical gravity from spontaneously localized quantum matter

Quantum Physics 2016-02-02 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

The possibility that a classical space-time and quantum matter cohabit at the deepest level, i.e. the possibility of having a fundamental and not phenomenological semiclassical gravity, is often disregarded for lack of a good candidate theory. The standard semiclassical theory suffers from fundamental inconsistencies (e.g.: Schr\"odinger cat sources, faster-than-light communication and violation of the Born rule) which can only be ignored in simple typical situations. We harness the power of spontaneous localization models, historically constructed to solve the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, to build a consistent theory of (stochastic) semiclassical gravity in the Newtonian limit. Our model makes quantitative and potentially testable predictions: we recover the Newtonian pair potential up to a short distance cut-off (hence we predict no 1 particle self-interaction) and uncover an additional gravitational decoherence term which depends on the specifics of the underlying spontaneous localization model considered. We hint at a possible program to go past the Newtonian limit, towards a consistent general relativistic semiclassical gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.08705,
  title  = {Sourcing semiclassical gravity from spontaneously localized quantum matter},
  author = {Antoine Tilloy and Lajos Diósi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.08705},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

9 pages + refs, 1 figure, typos corrected and minor modifications

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:08:03.434Z