Hybrid Classical-Quantum Newtonian Gravity with stable vacuum

TL;DR

The paper introduces the GPSL model, a hybrid classical-quantum gravity framework that ensures vacuum stability and predicts unique short-range gravitational effects, with potential for experimental testing.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid gravity model that couples classical Newtonian gravity to quantum matter via stochastic collapses, ensuring vacuum stability and differing from continuous measurement models.

Findings

GPSL ensures vacuum stability unlike previous models.

The model predicts short-range gravitational back-reaction.

Decoherence rates can be lower than in continuous measurement schemes.

Abstract

We investigate the Gravitational Poissonian Spontaneous Localization (GPSL) model, a hybrid classical-quantum model in which classical Newtonian gravity emerges from stochastic collapses of the mass density operator, and consistently couples to quantum matter. Unlike models based on continuous weak measurement schemes, we show that GPSL ensures vacuum stability; this, together with its applicability to identical particles and fields, makes it a promising candidate for a relativistic generalization. We analyze the model's general properties, and compare its predictions with those based on continuous weak measurement schemes. Notably, here the gravitational feedback enters entirely through the non-Hermitian jump operators, without modifying the unitary part of the dynamics. We show that this leads to a short-range gravitational back-reaction and permits decoherence rates below those of any model based on continuous weak measurement schemes. We provide explicit examples, including the dynamics of a single particle and a rigid sphere, to illustrate the distinctive phenomenology of the model. Finally, we discuss the experimental testability of GPSL, highlighting both interferometric and non-interferometric strategies to constrain its parameters and distinguish it from competing models.