Stochastic modification of the Schrodinger-Newton equation

Abstract

The Schr\"odinger-Newton [SN] equation describes the effect of self-gravity on the evolution of a quantum system, and it has been proposed that gravitationally induced decoherence drives the system to one of the stationary solutions of the SN equation. However, the equation by itself lacks a decoherence mechanism, because it does not possess any stochastic feature. In the present work we derive a stochastic modification of the Schr\"odinger-Newton equation, starting from the Einstein-Langevin equation in the theory of stochastic semiclassical gravity. We specialize this equation to the case of a single massive point particle, and by using Karolyhazy's phase variance method, we derive the Di\'osi - Penrose criterion for the decoherence time. We obtain a (nonlinear) master equation corresponding to this stochastic SN equation. This equation is however linear at the level of the approximation we use to prove decoherence, hence the no-signalling requirement is met. Lastly, we use physical arguments to obtain expressions for the decoherence length of extended objects.