Spontaneous Decoherence from Logarithmic Spectral Phase Deformations
Abstract
We examine a mechanism of spontaneous decoherence in which the generator of quantum dynamics is deformed to a logarithmically modified self-adjoint operator \begin{equation*} F_\beta(H) = H + \beta H \log \frac{H}{E_*} \end{equation*} for a positive self-adjoint Hamiltonian and a fixed reference scale . Dynamical phases acquire energy-dependent factors , whose rapid variation across the spectrum suppresses interference between distinct energies through a non-stationary-phase mechanism. Stationary-phase analysis shows that oscillatory contributions to amplitudes decay at least as when is large. Since is self-adjoint for every real , the evolution operator is unitary. The kinematical structure of quantum mechanics -- Hilbert-space inner products, projection operators, the Born rule -- remains unchanged. Decoherence arises as suppression of interference terms in coarse-grained observables and decoherence functionals, not as norm loss or stochastic collapse. Physical motivation for logarithmic spectral deformations comes from clock imperfections, renormalization-group and effective-action corrections introducing terms, and semiclassical gravity analyses with complex actions generating spectral factors involving . The mechanism is illustrated with two-level systems, quartic oscillators, FRW minisuperspace models, and Schwarzschild-interior-type Hamiltonians. Current superconducting-qubit coherence times constrain ; trapped ions, NV centers, and cold atoms could strengthen this to .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.09236,
title = {Spontaneous Decoherence from Logarithmic Spectral Phase Deformations},
author = {Sridhar Tayur},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09236},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
16 pages; The dynamics is reformulated using a real, self-adjoint logarithmic spectral deformation, making unitarity explicit and clarifying decoherence as non-stationary-phase suppression of interference rather than norm loss or collapse. Interpretive appendix is removed