TL;DR
This paper investigates whether short-wavelength gravitational modes can cause decoherence in long-wavelength modes using a simplified perturbative model of general relativity, highlighting conditions under which decoherence occurs.
Contribution
It introduces a simplified conformally flat model to analyze gravitational decoherence and identifies the influence of high-temperature short-wavelength modes on decoherence effectiveness.
Findings
Feynman-Vernon influence phase suppresses off-diagonal elements
High-temperature modes are necessary for effective decoherence
Perturbative approach has limited applicability under certain conditions
Abstract
The question of whether unobserved short-wavelength modes of the gravitational field can induce decoherence in the long-wavelength modes (``the decoherence of spacetime'') is addressed using a simplified model of perturbative general relativity, related to the Nordstrom-Einstein-Fokker theory, where the metric is assumed to be conformally flat. For some long-wavelength coarse grainings, the Feynman-Vernon influence phase is found to be effective at suppressing the off-diagonal elements of the decoherence functional. The requirement that the short-wavelength modes be in a sufficiently high-temperature state places limits on the applicability of this perturbative approach.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.