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Black Holes are Watching You

We show that if a massive body is put in a quantum superposition of spatially separated states, the mere presence of a black hole in the vicinity of the body will eventually destroy the coherence of the superposition.

Wednesday 28.09.2022 03:09 pm

This occurs because, in effect, the gravitational field of the body radiates soft gravitons into the black hole, allowing the black hole to acquire "which path" information about the superposition. A similar effect occurs for quantum superpositions of electrically charged bodies. We provide estimates of the decoherence time for such quantum superpositions. We believe that the fact that a black hole will eventually decohere any quantum superposition may be of fundamental significance for our understanding of the nature of black holes and Killing in a quantum theory of gravity.

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Speaker: Gautam Satishchandran (Princeton University)


 

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