Decoherence and bare mass induced by nonconformal metric fluctuations

Abstract

The effects, upon the Klein--Gordon field, of nonconformal stochastic metric fluctuations, are analyzed. It will be shown that these fluctuations allow us to consider an effective mass, i.e., the mass detected in a laboratory is not the parameter appearing in the Klein--Gordon equation, but a function of this parameter and of the fluctuations of the metric. In other words, in analogy to the case of a nonrelativistic electron in interaction with a quantized electromagnetic field, we may speak of a bare mass, where the observed mass shows a dependence upon the stochastic terms included in the metric. Afterwards, we prove, resorting to the influence functional, that the energy--momentum tensor of the Klein--Gordon field inherites this stochastic behavior, and that this feature provokes decoherence upon a particle immersed in the region where this tensor is present.

10 pages, accepted in General Relativity and Gravitation

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Metric fluctuations and the Weak Equivalence Principle
• Gravitational effects on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: a geometric approach
• The Generalized Uncertainty Principle and Higher Dimensions: Linking Black Holes and Elementary Particles
• Space--time fluctuations and the spreading of wavepackets
• Quantum spacetime fluctuations: Lamb Shift and hyperfine structure of the hydrogen atom
• Fluctuations of spacetime and holographic noise in atomic interferometry
• A fluctuating energy-momentum may produce an unstable world
• Quantum-Gravity phenomenology and high energy particle propagation