dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaCould Energy Decoherence due to Quantum Gravity be observed?
| Authors | Christoph Simon, Dieter Jaksch |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0406007 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0406007 |
| DOI | 10.1103/PhysRevA.70.052104 |
| Journal | Phys.Rev. A70 (2004) 052104 |
Abstract
It has recently been proposed that quantum gravity might lead to the decoherence of superpositions in energy, corresponding to a discretization of time at the Planck scale. At first sight the proposal seems amenable to experimental verification with methods from quantum optics and atomic physics. However, we argue that the predicted decoherence is unobservable in such experiments if it acts globally on the whole experimental setup. This is related to the unobservability of the global phase in interference. We also show how local energy decoherence, which acts separately on system and phase reference, could be detected with remarkable sensitivity and over a wide range of length scales by long-distance Ramsey interferometry with metastable atomic states. The sensitivity of the experiments can be further enhanced using multi-atom entanglement.
{
"annotation_id": "1a61b7db-8cc5-41e1-bcc7-b26d72be5f6f",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:02:06.647000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:02:06.647000Z",
"file_hash": "58ce0944c2fd66d379e048786ca1c68f4f25e48ddf90787664572cf230e91e29",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "It has recently been proposed that quantum gravity might lead to the\ndecoherence of superpositions in energy, corresponding to a discretization of\ntime at the Planck scale. At first sight the proposal seems amenable to\nexperimental verification with methods from quantum optics and atomic physics.\nHowever, we argue that the predicted decoherence is unobservable in such\nexperiments if it acts globally on the whole experimental setup. This is\nrelated to the unobservability of the global phase in interference. We also\nshow how local energy decoherence, which acts separately on system and phase\nreference, could be detected with remarkable sensitivity and over a wide range\nof length scales by long-distance Ramsey interferometry with metastable atomic\nstates. The sensitivity of the experiments can be further enhanced using\nmulti-atom entanglement.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0406007",
"authors": [
"Christoph Simon",
"Dieter Jaksch"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph",
"gr-qc"
],
"doi": "10.1103/PhysRevA.70.052104",
"journal_ref": "Phys.Rev. A70 (2004) 052104",
"title": "Could Energy Decoherence due to Quantum Gravity be observed?",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0406007"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "f3b20415-d6d7-4db2-a865-f3707b28de30",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}