Quantum Hotspots: Mean Fields, Open EFTs, Nonlocality and Decoherence Near Black Holes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Effective theories describing black hole exteriors resemble open quantum systems inasmuch as many unmeasurable degrees of freedom beyond the horizon interact with those we can see. A solvable Caldeira‐Leggett type model of a quantum field that mixes with many unmeasured thermal degrees of freedom on a shared surface was proposed in arXiv:2106.09854 to provide a benchmark against which more complete black hole calculations might be compared. We here use this model to test two types of field‐theoretic approximation schemes that also lend themselves to describing black hole behaviour: Open EFT techniques (as applied to the fields themselves, rather than Unruh‐DeWitt detectors) and mean‐field methods. Mean‐field methods are of interest because the effective Hamiltonians to which they lead can be nonlocal; a possible source for the nonlocality that is sometimes entertained as being possible for black holes in the near‐horizon regime. Open EFTs compute the evolution of the field state, allowing discussion of thermalization and decoherence even when these occur at such late times that perturbative methods fail (as they often do). Applying both of these methods to a solvable system identifies their domains of validity and shows how their predictions relate to more garden‐variety perturbative tools.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".