Effective dark energy from decoherence

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum decoherence and environmental encoding could explain dark energy, linking quantum information theory with cosmological observations and estimating the energy involved in such processes.

Contribution

It applies the quantum Darwinist framework to cosmology, proposing a novel connection between environmental encoding of stellar positions and dark energy.

Findings

Estimated free energy matches observed dark energy density.

Environmental encoding of stellar positions requires minimal energy at current CMB temperature.

Reducing voxel size increases energy requirement dramatically.

Abstract

Within the quantum Darwinist framework introduced by W. H. Zurek ({\em Nat. Phys.}, 5:181-188, 2009), observers obtain pointer-state information about quantum systems by interacting with a local sample of the surrounding environment, e.g. a local sample of the ambient photon field. Because the environment encodes such pointer state information uniformly and hence redundantly throughout its entire volume, the information is equally available to all observers regardless of their location. This framework is applied to the observation of stellar center-of-mass positions, which are assumed to be encoded by the ambient photon field in a way that is uniformly accessible to all possible observers. Assuming Landauer's Principle, constructing such environmental encodings requires $(ln2) kT$ per encoded bit. For the observed 10$^{24}$ stars and a uniform binary encoding of center-of-mass positions into voxels with a linear dimension of 5 km, the free energy required at the current CMB temperature T = 2.7 K is $\sim$ 2.5 $\cdot$ 10$^{-27}$ kg $\cdot$ m$^{-3}$, strikingly close to the observed value of $\Omega_{\Lambda} \rho_{c}$. Decreasing the voxel size to $(l_{P})^{3}$ results in a free energy requirement 10$^{117}$ times larger.