Effective Field Theory Approach to Gravitationally Induced Decoherence

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that gravity acts as an environment causing rapid decoherence of matter superpositions with energy differences above the Planck scale, using an effective field theory approach to quantum gravity.

Contribution

It introduces an effective field theory framework to analyze gravitationally induced decoherence in quantum superpositions at high energies.

Findings

Decoherence occurs rapidly for superpositions with energy differences above the Planck scale.

Gravity can serve as an environment leading to loss of quantum coherence.

The approach is based on standard perturbative quantum gravity as an effective theory.

Abstract

Adopting the viewpoint that the standard perturbative quantization of general relativity provides an effective description of quantum gravity that is valid at ordinary energies, we show that gravity as an environment induces the rapid decoherence of stationary matter superposition states when the energy differences in the superposition exceed the Planck energy scale.