Testing Quantum Foundations With Atomic Clocks

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has recently drawn attention by disliking quantum mechanics. Besides an article for The New York Review of Books and a public lecture to bemoan how unsatisfactory the current situation is, he has, however, also written a technical paper:

Lindblad Decoherence in Atomic Clocks, Steven Weinberg, Phys. Rev. A 94, 042117 (2016), arXiv: 1610.02537 [quant-ph]

In this paper, Weinberg studies the use of atomic clocks for precision tests of quantum mechanics. Specifically, to search for an unexpected, omnipresent, decoherence .

Decoherence is the process that destroys quantum-ness. It happens constantly and everywhere. Each time a quantum state interacts with an environment – air, light, neutrinos, what have you – it becomes a little less quantum.

This type of decoherence explains why, in every-day life, we don’t see quantum-typical behavior, like cats being both dead and alive and similar nonsense. Trouble is, decoherence takes place only if you consider the environment a source of noise whose exact behavior is unknown. If you look at the combined system of the quantum state plus environment, that still doesn’t decohere. So how come on large scales our world is distinctly un-quantum?

More here.