Gravitational Decoherence, Asymptotic Quantization, and Entanglement Measures

Abstract

Graviton emission decoheres superpositions of matter states. We write the decoherence rate in terms of a "differential Bondi news" function, and show that this function can be written as an overlap integral between different asymptotic radiative states given by Ashtekar. This result - while derived in the linearized theory - is ultimately expressed for asymptotically flat space-times in terms of variables with unambiguous geometric meaning in the full theory. We treat a simple two-path experiment, and compute the differential news, the purity, the entanglement entropy, and the fidelity, to make explicit the connection with the information loss.