On the quantum mechanics of entropic forces

TL;DR

This paper presents quantum models demonstrating how gravity could emerge from entropic principles, proposing a microscopic basis for entropic gravity and suggesting experimental ways to distinguish these models from traditional quantum gravity.

Contribution

It introduces specific quantum models that realize gravity as an entropic force, providing a detailed microscopic mechanism and experimental distinctions from standard quantum gravity.

Findings

Gravity can emerge from extremizing free energy of quantum systems.

Local and non-local models are constructed to realize entropic gravity.

Proposals are made to distinguish these models from perturbative quantum gravity experimentally.

Abstract

It was conjectured thirty years ago that gravity could arise from the entropic re-arrangement of information. In this paper, we offer a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. In particular, we suggest a simple mechanism by which Newton's law of gravity arises from extremization of the free energy of a collection of qubits or oscillators, rather than from the exchange of virtual quanta of a fundamental field. We give both a local and non-local version of the construction, and show how to distinguish a range of these entropic models from ordinary perturbative quantum gravity using existing observations and near-term experiments.