Complementarity and causal propagation of decoherence by measurement in relativistic quantum field theories

Abstract

Entanglement generation by Newtonian gravitational potential between objects has been widely discussed to reveal the quantum nature of gravity. In this paper, we perform a quantum field theoretical analysis of a slightly modified version of the gedanken experiment by Mari and co-workers. We show that decoherence due to the presence of a detector propagates with the speed of light in terms of a retarded Green's function, as it should be consistent with causality of relativistic field theories. The quantum nature of fields, such as quantum fluctuations or emission of gravitons expressed in terms of the Keldysh Green's function also play important roles in the mechanism of decoherence due to on-shell particle creation. We also discuss the trade-off relation between the visibility of the interference and the distinguishability of the measurement, known as the wave particle duality, in our setup.