Does decoherence violate decoupling?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A bstract Recent calculations in both flat and de Sitter spacetimes have highlighted a tension between the decoupling of high-energy physics from low-energy degrees of freedom and the expectation that quantum systems decohere due to interactions with unknown environments. In effective field theory (EFT), integrating out heavy fields should lead to Hamiltonian time evolution, which preserves the purity of low-energy states. This is consistent with the fact that we never observe isolated quantum states spontaneously decohering in the vacuum due to unknown high-energy physics. However, when a heavy scalar of mass M is traced out, the resulting purity of a light scalar with mass m typically appears to scale as a power of 1/ M (when m ≪ M ), an effect that cannot be captured by a local effective Hamiltonian. We resolve this apparent paradox by showing that the purity depends on the resolution scale of the EFT and how the environment is traced out. We provide a practical method for diagnosing the purity of low-energy states consistent with EFT expectations, and briefly discuss some of the implications these observations have for how ultraviolet divergences can appear in decoherence calculations.
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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".