Decoherence of black hole superpositions by Hawking radiation

Andrew Arrasmith, Andreas Albrecht and Wojciech H. Zurek ()
Additional contact information
Andrew Arrasmith: LANL
Andreas Albrecht: University of California Davis
Wojciech H. Zurek: LANL

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-5

Abstract: Abstract An environment interacting with a system acquires information about it, e.g. about its location. The resulting decoherence is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the classical realm of our Universe out of the quantum substrate. However, this view of the emergence of the classical is sometimes dismissed as a consequence of insufficient isolation and, hence, as non-fundamental. In contrast to many other systems, a black hole can never be isolated from its Hawking radiation which carries information about its location, making this lack of isolation fundamental. Here we consider the decoherence of a “black hole Schrödinger cat”—a non-local superposition of a Schwarzschild black hole in two distinct locations—due to its Hawking radiation. The resulting decoherence rate turns out to be given by a surprisingly simple equation. Moreover, and in contrast to known cases of decoherence, this rate does not involve Planck’s constant ħ.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08426-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-08426-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08426-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().