Gravitationally induced decoherence

[Tejinder Singh]

Gravity induced decoherence from a stochastic Schrodinger-Newton equation

Sayantani Bera, Ravi Mohan and Tejinder Singh
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai

Reference: arXiv:1504.05892 v2

The Schrodinger-Newton [SN] equation describes the effect of self-gravity on the evolution of a quantum system, and it has been proposed that gravitationally induced decoherence drives the system to one of the stationary solutions of the SN equation. However, the equation by itself lacks a decoherence mechanism, because it does not possess any stochastic feature. In the present work we derive a stochastic modification of the Schrodinger-Newton equation, starting from the Einstein-Langevin equation in the theory of stochastic semiclassical gravity. We specialize this equation to the case of a single massive point particle, and by using Karolyhazy’s phase variance method, we derive the Di\’osi – Penrose criterion for the decoherence time. We obtain a (nonlinear) master equation corresponding to this stochastic SN equation. This equation is however linear at the level of the approximation we use to prove decoherence; hence the no-signalling requirement is met.

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