Gravitational Decoherence for Mesoscopic Systems

TL;DR

This paper extends gravitational decoherence analysis to mesoscopic systems, showing that interferometric visibility remains bounded and does not vanish completely over time, unlike collisional decoherence.

Contribution

It introduces a new formulation of gravitational decoherence in terms of energy variance for mesoscopic systems, highlighting differences from collisional decoherence.

Findings

Interferometric visibility is bounded from below.

Visibility can become very small but does not reach zero.

Extension of gravitational decoherence analysis to internal energy superpositions.

Abstract

We extend the recent gravitational decoherence analysis of Pikovski et al. to an individual mesoscopic system with internal state characterized by a coherent superposition of energy eigenstates. We express the Pikovski et al. effect directly in terms of the energy variance, and show that the interferometric visibility is bounded from below. Hence unlike collisional decoherence, the visibility does not approach zero at large times, although for a large system it can become very small.