An Indication From the Magnitude of CP Violations that Gravitation is a Possible Cause of Wave-Function Collapse

TL;DR

The paper suggests that CP violation evidence indicates wave-function collapse may be linked to gravitational effects at the Planck scale, proposing a nonlinear modification to quantum mechanics.

Contribution

It introduces a hypothesis connecting CP violation to wave-function collapse driven by gravity, with a specific scale near the Planck energy, and predicts observable consequences in meson decays.

Findings

CP violation implies a collapse scale near the Planck energy

Collapse hypothesis predicts a specific CP violation rate in B mesons

A nonlinear stochastic Schrödinger equation models the collapse process

Abstract

We consider experimental evidence for the hypothesis that the Planck energy, $E_p \approx 10^{19}GeV$, sets the scale $\epsilon$ at which wave function collapse causes deviations from linear Schr\"{o}dinger evolution. With a few plausible assumptions about the collapse process, we first show that the observed CP violation in $K_L$ decay implies a lower bound on $\epsilon$ remarkably close to $E_p$. If the bound is saturated, the entire CP violation is due to collapse and a prediction made that the branching ratio for CP violation in the B meson decay will be $\gamma \approx 10^{-5}$. We then show that the assumptions are consequences of a simple non-linear, stochastic modification of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with $\epsilon$ setting the scale of the non-linearity.