Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 275

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Universal decoherence due to gravitational time dilation

Open access
Pikovski, Igor, Zych, Magdalena, Costa, Fabio, Brukner, Časlav·2015·Nature Physics
DOI 10.1038/nphys3366
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The physics of low-energy quantum systems is usually studied without explicit consideration of the background spacetime. Phenomena inherent to quantum theory in curved spacetime, such as Hawking radiation, are typically assumed to be relevant only for extreme physical conditions: at high energies and in strong gravitational fields. Here we consider low-energy quantum mechanics in the presence of gravitational time dilation and show that the latter leads to the decoherence of quantum superpositions. Time dilation induces a universal coupling between the internal degrees of freedom and the centre of mass of a composite particle. The resulting correlations lead to decoherence in the particle position, even without any external environment. We also show that the weak time dilation on Earth is already sufficient to affect micrometre-scale objects. Gravity can therefore account for the emergence of classicality and this effect could in principle be tested in future matter-wave experiments. Gravity and quantum mechanics are expected to meet at extreme energy scales, but time dilation could induce decoherence even at low energies affecting microscopic objects—a prospect that could be tested in future matter-wave experiments.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nphys3366

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Cited by

See all 275

Metadata

Authors
Pikovski, I., Zych, M., Costa, F., & Brukner, Č.
Venue
Nature Physics
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2015-06-15
Volume
11
Issue
8
Pages
668-672
ISSN
  • 1745-2473 (ISSN-L)
  • 1745-2481
DOI
10.1038/nphys3366
OpenAlex
W1946254603
Cited by
275
References
40
FWCI
14.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.