High Energy Theory Seminar

Recently it was shown that black holes passively impart a fundamental rate of decoherence on all nearby quantum superpositions (Danielson, Satishchandran, Wald 2022).  This surprising result can be calculated and understood in two rather different frameworks, one emphasizing the presence of a horizon (causality) and the other emphasizing the peculiar low-frequency behavior of vacuum fluctuations near a black hole (fluctuation and dissipation).  I will review both perspectives and describe our precise results for decoherence rates near Kerr black holes (Gralla and Wei 2024).  The extremal limit is particularly interesting, connecting to the ``black hole Meissner effect'' familiar from astrophysical studies.  These dual perspectives on a novel physical observable may inform the overall question of whether black holes are ``just'' ordinary quantum systems at finite temperature, or whether they are somehow fundamentally different.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom information.