Gravitational decoherence and recoherence of a composite particle: the interplay between gravitons and a classical Newtonian potential

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.