Bootstrapping Time Dilation Decoherence
Cisco Gooding, William G. Unruh

TL;DR
This paper models a self-gravitating system with a clock that experiences time dilation, leading to intrinsic decoherence effects that are fundamentally gravitational but also persist without gravity.
Contribution
It introduces a relativistic model with a self-interacting shell and internal clock, demonstrating a gravitational intrinsic decoherence mechanism that extends previous proposals.
Findings
Decoherence arises from proper time differences, independent of gravity.
Self-interaction enhances gravitational time dilation decoherence.
Decoherence persists even in flat spacetime, emphasizing its fundamental nature.
Abstract
We present a general relativistic model of a spherical shell of matter with a perfect fluid on its surface coupled to an internal oscillator, which generalizes a model recently introduced by the authors to construct a self-gravitating interferometer [1]. The internal oscillator evolution is defined with respect to the local proper time of the shell, allowing the oscillator to serve as a local clock that ticks differently depending on the shell's position and momentum. A Hamiltonian reduction is performed on the system, and an approximate quantum description is given to the reduced phase space. If we focus only on the external dynamics, we must trace out the clock degree of freedom, and this results in a form of intrinsic decoherence that shares some features with a proposed "universal" decoherence mechanism attributed to gravitational time dilation [2]. We note that the proposed…
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