Spacetime foam induced collective bundling of intense fields

• Published in: Physical review. D 2016-09, Vol.94 (6), Article 061501
• Main Authors: Oniga, Teodora, Wang, Charles H.-T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Boson fields; Bosons; Energy dissipation; Gravitation; Gravitational waves; Gravitons; Initial conditions; Markov processes; Momentum; Photons; Relativity; Spacetime; Variations; Wave propagation
• ISSN: 2470-0010; 2470-0029
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.94.061501

The influence of spacetime foam on a broad class of bosonic fields with arbitrary numbers of particles in the low-energy regime is investigated. Based on a recently formulated general description of open quantum gravitational systems, we analyze the propagation of scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational waves on both long and short time scales with respect to their mean frequencies. For the long time propagation, the Markov approximation that neglects the effects of initial conditions of these waves is employed. In this case, despite intuitively expected decoherence and dissipation from the noisy spacetime, we show that such phenomena turn out to be completely suppressed for scalar bosons, photons, and gravitons, which are coupled to gravity but otherwise free. The short time effects are then recovered through the transient non-Markovian evolution. Focusing on scalar bosons in initially incoherent states, we find that the resulting quantum dissipation depends strongly on the distribution of the particle momentum states. We further identify a hitherto undiscovered collective antidissipation mechanism for a large number of particles. The surprising new effect tends to “bundle” identical particles within sharply distributed momentum states having a width inversely proportional to the particle number due to the thermal fluctuations, or its square root due to the vacuum fluctuations of spacetime.