Bootstrapping Time Dilation Decoherence

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 decoherence remains present in the (gravity-free) limit of flat spacetime, emphasizing that the effect can be attributed entirely to proper time differences, and thus is not necessarily related to gravity. Whereas the effect described in [2] vanishes in the absence of an external gravitational field, our approach bootstraps the gravitational contribution to the time dilation decoherence by including self-interaction, yielding a fundamentally gravitational intrinsic decoherence effect.