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It was previously shown that if an experimenter, Alice, puts a massive or charged body in a quantum spatial superposition, then the presence of a black hole (or more generally any Killing horizon) will eventually decohere the superposition [arXiv:2205.06279, arXiv:2301.00026, arXiv:2311.11461]. This decoherence was identified as resulting from the radiation of soft photons/gravitons through the horizon, thus suggesting that the global structure of the spacetime is essential for describing the decoherence. In this paper, we show that the decoherence can alternatively be described in terms of the local two-point function of the quantum field within Alice's lab, without any direct reference to the horizon. From this point of view, the decoherence of Alice's superposition in the presence of a black hole arises from the extremely low frequency Hawking quanta present in Alice's lab. We explicitly calculate the decoherence occurring in Schwarzschild spacetime in the Unruh vacuum from the local viewpoint. We then use this viewpoint to elucidate (i) the differences in decoherence effects that would occur in Schwarzschild spacetime in the Boulware and Hartle-Hawking vacua; (ii) the difference in decoherence effects that would occur in Minkowski spacetime filled with a thermal bath as compared with Schwarzschild spacetime; (iii) the lack of decoherence in the spacetime of a static star even though the vacuum state outside the star is similar in many respects to the Boulware vacuum around a black hole; and (iv) the requirements on the degrees of freedom of a material body needed to produce a decoherence effect that mimics that of a black hole., Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure

We recently showed that if a massive (or charged) body is put in a quantum spatial superposition, the mere presence of a black hole in its vicinity will eventually decohere the superposition. In this paper we show that, more generally, decoherence of stationary superpositions will occur in any spacetime with a Killing horizon. This occurs because, in effect, the long-range field of the body is registered on the Killing horizon which, we show, necessitates a flux of "soft horizon gravitons/photons" through the horizon. The Killing horizon thereby harvests "which path" information of quantum superpositions and will decohere any quantum superposition in a finite time. It is particularly instructive to analyze the case of a uniformly accelerating body in a quantum superposition in flat spacetime. As we show, from the Rindler perspective the superposition is decohered by "soft gravitons/photons" that propagate through the Rindler horizon with negligible (Rindler) energy. We show that this decoherence effect is distinct from--and larger than--the decoherence resulting from the presence of Unruh radiation. We further show that from the inertial perspective, the decoherence is due to the radiation of high frequency (inertial) gravitons/photons to null infinity. (The notion of gravitons/photons that propagate through the Rindler horizon is the same notion as that of gravitons/photons that propagate to null infinity.) We also analyze the decoherence of a spatial superposition due to the presence of a cosmological horizon in de Sitter spacetime. We provide estimates of the decoherence time for such quantum superpositions in both the Rindler and cosmological cases. Although we explicitly treat the case of spacetime dimension $d=4$, our analysis applies to any dimension $d \geq 4$., Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D. v2: Added clarifying remarks and a figure, and pointed out that the effect arises for any d>=4; corrected equation (3.18)

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. 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 in a quantum theory of gravity., Comment: 10 pages. Third prize essay in the Gravity Research Foundation 2022 Essays on Gravitation. Minor editorial changes in v2

We argue that if the Newtonian gravitational field of a body can mediate entanglement with another body, then it should also be possible for the body producing the Newtonian field to entangle directly with on-shell gravitons. Our arguments are made by revisiting a gedankenexperiment previously analyzed by Belenchia et al., which showed that a quantum superposition of a massive body requires both quantized gravitational radiation and local vacuum fluctuations of the spacetime metric in order to avoid contradictions with complementarity and causality. We provide a precise and rigorous description of the entanglement and decoherence effects occurring in this gedankenexperiment, thereby significantly improving upon the back-of-the-envelope estimates given in the analysis of Belenchia et al. and also showing that their conclusions are valid in much more general circumstances. As a by-product of our analysis, we show that under the protocols of the gedankenexperiment, there is no clear distinction between entanglement mediated by the Newtonian gravitational field of a body and entanglement mediated by on-shell gravitons emitted by the body. This suggests that Newtonian entanglement implies the existence of graviton entanglement and supports the view that the experimental discovery of Newtonian entanglement may be viewed as implying the existence of the graviton., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. Minor editorial changes in v2 and v3

Recently, Bl\'azquez-Salcedo, Knoll, and Radu (BSKR) have given a class of static, spherically symmetric, traversable wormhole spacetimes with Dirac and Maxwell fields. The BSKR wormholes are obtained by joining a classical solution to the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell (EDM) equations on the "up" side of the wormhole ($r \geq 0$) to a corresponding solution on the "down" side of the wormhole ($r \leq 0$). However, it can be seen that the BSKR metric fails to be $C^3$ on the wormhole throat at $r=0$. We prove that if the matching were done in such a way that the resulting spacetime metric, Dirac field, and Maxwell field composed a solution to the EDM equations in a neighborhood of $r=0$, then all of the fields would be smooth at $r=0$ in a suitable gauge. Thus, the BSKR wormholes cannot be solutions to the EDM equations. The failure of the BSKR wormholes to solve the EDM equations arises both from the failure of the Maxwell field to satisfy the required matching conditions (which implies the presence of an additional shell of charged matter at $r=0$) and, more significantly, from the failure of the Dirac field to satisfy required matching conditions (which implies the presence of a spurious source term for the Dirac field at $r=0$., Comment: 12 pages, no figures