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Does gravity itself make big objects collapse out of quantum superposition?

Hiroki Takeda, Shogo Tomizuka, Takahiro Tanaka

June 2, 2026

Gravity can induce quantum decoherence—the process where superposed states lose coherence—by coupling to environmental fields through graviton exchange. Using influence functionals from quantum field theory, the team derived decoherence rates for macroscopic objects and found that gravitational effects accumulate logarithmically across distance but remain negligible compared to collisional decoherence in normal settings.
Published as Gravitationally Induced Quantum Decoherence of Macroscopic Objects arXiv:2606.04099
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