Gravitational decoherence and recoherence of a composite particle: the interplay between gravitons and a classical Newtonian potential
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.22517 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 26 Feb 2026] Title:Gravitational decoherence and recoherence of a composite particle: the interplay between gravitons and a classical Newtonian potential Authors:Thiago H. Moreira, Lucas Chibebe Céleri View a PDF of the paper titled Gravitational decoherence and recoherence of a composite particle: the interplay between gravitons and a classical Newtonian potential, by Thiago H. Moreira and Lucas Chibebe C\'eleri View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The fact that gravitational environments cannot be shielded (since gravity is universal) makes them of great theoretical interest to decoherence mechanisms and to the quantum-to-classical transition. While past results seemed to indicate that graviton-induced decoherence of spatial superpositions happens only for macroscopic systems, recently it was shown that this mechanism can be enhanced through the system's own dynamical internal structure. In this work, we extend this analysis by including the interaction with a classical Newtonian potential. We show that, although the graviton bath alone dominates the mechanism for short times compared to a timescale established by the size of the quantum spatial superposition, the interplay between the gravitons and the internal degrees of freedom of the system renders decoherence inevitable in the long-time limit, even for microscopic masses. We also show that this mechanism is slightly slowed down by the interplay with the classical Newtonian potential, which, for systems without dynamical internal degrees of freedom, can even lead to recoherence, at least in principle. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) Cite as: arXiv:2602.22517 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.22517v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.22517 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Lucas Céleri [view email] [v1] Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:24:47 UTC (497 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Gravitational decoherence and recoherence of a composite particle: the interplay between gravitons and a classical Newtonian potential, by Thiago H. Moreira and Lucas Chibebe C\'eleriView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: gr-qc References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)