Hi all,
On Tuesday our visitor from the university of Naples, Giulia Gubitosi, will tell us about "Fundamental decoherence from quantum spacetime". See below for the abstract. The talk will take place at 1:30pm in HIT E 41.1.
Best, Ladina
*** Title: Fundamental decoherence from quantum spacetime
Abstract:
I will show that quantum properties of spacetime, encoded by noncommutativity at the Planck scale, lead to a generalized time evolution of quantum systems in which pure states can evolve into mixed states. Specifically, a Lindblad equation arises naturally as the evolution equation of quantum systems living in a noncommutative spacetime, where the symmetry generators are deformed and described by nontrivial Hopf algebras. This leads to a fundamental decoherence mechanism by which the density operator of a quantum system asymptotically approaches a maximally mixed state. By analysing the decoherence time for the evolution of a free particle I will also show that that the Planck mass is the maximum allowed mass for elementary quantum systems.