2015/03/31 by Cisco Gooding, William G. Unruh · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dilation (metric space) #Gravitation #Gravitational time dilation #Hamiltonian (control theory) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Quantum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum decoherence #Quantum gravity #gr-qc #hep-th #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10701-015-9939-9
published in Foundations of Physics 45(10), 1166-1178 (Springer Science+Business Media) · 7 pages. Minor revisions, accepted for publication in Foundations of Physics
arxiv created 2015/07/07 · openalex publication_date 2015/07/17 · arxiv updated 2015/10/16 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a general relativistic model of a spherical shell of matter with a perfect fluid on its surface coupled to an internal oscillator, which generalizes a model recently introduced by the authors to construct a self-gravitating interferometer [1]. The internal oscillator evolution is defined with respect to the local proper time of the shell, allowing the oscillator to serve as a local clock that ticks differently depending on the shell's position and momentum. A Hamiltonian reduction is performed on the system, and an approximate quantum description is given to the reduced phase space. If we focus only on the external dynamics, we must trace out the clock degree of freedom, and this results in a form of intrinsic decoherence that shares some features with a proposed "universal" decoherence mechanism attributed to gravitational time dilation [2]. We note that the proposed decoherence remains present in the (gravity-free) limit of flat spacetime, emphasizing that the effect can be attributed entirely to proper time differences, and thus is not necessarily related to gravity. Whereas the effect described in [2] vanishes in the absence of an external gravitational field, our approach bootstraps the gravitational contribution to the time dilation decoherence by including self-interaction, yielding a fundamentally gravitational intrinsic decoherence effect.