Speaker
Description
The emergence of the classical macroscopic world from the microscopic quantum realm is a long-standing open problem, still heavily debated in the physics community and subject to theoretical and experimental research. I will show that quantum properties of spacetime, encoded by noncommutativity at the Planck scale, lead to a generalized time evolution of quantum systems in which pure states can evolve into mixed states. Specifically, a Lindblad equation arises naturally as the evolution equation of quantum systems living in a noncommutative spacetime, where the symmetry generators are deformed and described by nontrivial Hopf algebras. This leads to a fundamental decoherence mechanism by which the density operator of a quantum system asymptotically approaches a maximally mixed state. By analysing the decoherence time for the evolution of a free particle I will also show that that the Planck mass is the maximum allowed mass for elementary quantum systems.
