Decoherence of black hole superpositions

Abstract

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 the Hawking radiation it inevitably emits. An environment interacting with a system acquires information about its state, 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 (i.e., for practical purposes only). A black hole can never be isolated from its own Hawking radiation environment that carries information about its location. The resulting decoherence rate turns out to be given by a surprisingly simple equation that, remarkably (and in contrast to known cases of decoherence), does not involve Planck's constant $\hslash$.

6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• The Rate of Binary Black Hole Mergers Inferred from Advanced LIGO Observations Surrounding GW150914
• Theory of decoherence in a matter wave Talbot-Lau interferometer
• Quantum Darwinism, Classical Reality, and the Randomness of Quantum Jumps

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• General Relativistic Decoherence with Applications to Dark Matter Detection
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• Refined diamond norm bounds on the emergence of objectivity of observables
• Accelerated detector in a superposed spacetime
• Gravity-induced entanglement between two massive microscopic particles in curved spacetime: I.The Schwarzschild background
• Quantum correlation and origin of Hawking radiation for mass-superposed BTZ black holes