Abstract
We discuss decrease of coherence in a massive system due to the emission of gravitational waves. In particular we investigate environmental gravitational decoherence in the context of an interference experiment. The time-evolution of the reduced density matrix is solved analytically using the path-integral formalism. Furthermore, we study the impact of a tensor noise onto the coherence properties of massive systems. We discuss that a particular choice of tensor noise shows similarities to a mechanism proposed by Diósiand Penrose.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in testing gravitational decoherence or possible gravitational effects on quantum mechanics (QM) in condensed matter and quantum-optical systems [1, 2, 3]
Tensor noise model It has been argued that the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics may lead to a form of intrinsic decoherence [4, 5, 6]
We studied the decrease of coherence due to the emission of gravitational waves and gave an estimate for the emitted gravitational energy
Summary
There has been a growing interest in testing gravitational decoherence or possible gravitational effects on quantum mechanics (QM) in condensed matter and quantum-optical systems [1, 2, 3]. An observer who has only access to system degrees of freedom observes a nonunitary dynamics which can be obtained by tracing out the environmental degrees of freedom from the total density matrix. This averaging generically reduces the coherence of the reduced density matrix describing the system. It has been argued that gravity might lead to a loss of coherence which cannot be discussed in terms of standard quantum mechanics [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. We point out several problems which come along when one introduces a tensor noise “by hand”
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