Planck-scale dissipative effects in atom interferometry

Abstract

Atom interferometers can be used to study phenomena leading to irreversibility and dissipation, induced by the dynamics of fundamental objects (strings and branes) at a large mass scale. Using an effective, but physically consistent description in terms of a master equation of Lindblad form, the modifications of the interferometric pattern induced by the new phenomena are analyzed in detail. We find that present experimental devices can in principle provide stringent bounds on the new effects.

Neutral kaons in random media

“…[9][10][11][12][13] Indeed, for weakly-coupled systems, the decoherence and dissipative phenomena induced by the media are in general very small, so that the most suited way to study them is through appropriate interferometric set-ups. [14][15][16] Motivated by these results, in the following similar techniques will be adopted to study effects of irreversibility and dissipation in neutral kaons propagating inside a random medium. Because of strangeness oscillations, neutral kaons have been one of the prime laboratory for the discovery and analysis of small physical effects, CP violation being the most striking example; [17,18] therefore, they appear to be the natural place for studying environment-induced dissipative effects, also in view of the unique opportunities offered by the production of correlated kaons at φ-factories.…”

Quantum dynamical semigroups and non-decomposable positive maps

“…Remark 6 In (19), the Kraus-Stinespring form (6) is apparent in the first factor, while the second factor is decomposed as in (9). Since the map Γ t from M 4 (C) into itself is positive, but not completely positive, the question whether it is decomposable or not makes sense.…”

“…They have been succesfully used in many phenomenological applications in quantum chemistry, quantum optics and statistical physics [1,2,3,4]; they have also been applied to dissipative phenomena induced by fundamental dynamics in various elementary particle systems [5,6,7,8,9].…”

Open Quantum Dynamics: Complete Positivity and Entanglement

“…21 These effects produce distinctive signatures in the behaviour of selected physical observables, allowing direct experimental testing (for specific treatments and further details, see Refs. [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]). …”