Gravitationally Induced Quantum Decoherence of Macroscopic Objects

Abstract:We formulate the gravitationally induced quantum decoherence of a massive object prepared in a spatial superposition. Starting from linearized gravity coupled to a massive system particle and an environmental scalar field, we derive a closed-time-path influence functional governing the reduced system dynamics. In the nonrelativistic and quasi-static regime, the decoherence exponent can be written as a bilinear functional of the difference of the system stress-energy tensors and an effective noise kernel obtained by dressing the environmental stress-energy tensor correlator with graviton propagators. We then apply this framework to the Newtonian long-range gravitational interaction and evaluate the resulting decoherence function for a dilute nonrelativistic gas modeled by finite wave packets and coarse-grained in time and space. By performing controlled approximations, we obtain analytic expressions for the cumulative decoherence function and show that the dominant contribution is accumulated logarithmically over a broad range of distances, while remaining subdominant to conventional collisional decoherence under realistic conditions.

arXiv:2606.04099 [gr-qc]

(or arXiv:2606.04099v1 [gr-qc] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04099 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)