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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 16: Quantum Gravity 4

AGPhil 16.1: Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 16:45–17:15, PTB SR AvHB

Decoherence of a composite particle induced by a weak quantized gravitational field — •Thiago H. Moreira and Lucas C. Céleri — Institute of Physics, Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia, Goiás 74.690-900, Brazil

In recent years, several proposals for experimentally investigating quantum gravitational effects far from the Planck scale have recently appeared in literature, like gravitationally induced entanglement, for instance. An important issue of these approaches is the decoherence introduced by the quantum nature not only of the system under consideration but also from the gravitational field itself. Here, by means of the Feynman Vernon influence functional, we study the decoherence of a quantum system induced by the quantized gravitational field (in the linearized gravity) regime and also by its own quantum internal degrees of freedom. Due to the universal nature of the gravitational coupling, both environments are not independent, meaning that, within the Feynman Vernon influence functional technique, the non additivity of the noise effects results in a contribution to the decoherence rate that comes from the interaction between the two environments. This is another decoherence effect that should be taken into account when considering experimental proposals for detecting quantum effects of gravity. The decoherence rate was computed by considering a superposition of the relevant degrees of freedom, from which we estimated the decoherence time.

Keywords: decoherence; gravitons; influence functional; internal degrees of freedom; stochastic effective action