Qubits on the horizon: decoherence and thermalization near black holes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A bstract We examine the late-time evolution of a qubit (or Unruh-De Witt detector) that hovers very near to the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole, while interacting with a free quantum scalar field. The calculation is carried out perturbatively in the dimensionless qubit/field coupling g , but rather than computing the qubit excitation rate due to field interactions (as is often done), we instead use Open EFT techniques to compute the late-time evolution to all orders in g 2 t/r s (while neglecting order g 4 t/r s effects) where r s = 2 GM is the Schwarzschild radius. We show that for qubits sufficiently close to the horizon the late-time evolution takes a simple universal form that depends only on the near-horizon geometry, assuming only that the quantum field is prepared in a Hadamard-type state (such as the Hartle-Hawking or Unruh vacua). When the redshifted energy difference, ω ∞ , between the two qubit states (as measured by a distant observer looking at the detector) satisfies ω ∞ r s ≪ 1 this universal evolution becomes Markovian and describes an exponential approach to equilibrium with the Hawking radiation, with the off-diagonal and diagonal components of the qubit density matrix relaxing to equilibrium with different characteristic times, both of order r s /g 2 .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".