Kinetic Spin Decoherence in a Gravitational Field

Abstract

We consider a wave packet of a spin-1/2 particle in a gravitational field, the effect of which can be described in terms of a succession of local inertial frames. It is shown that integrating out of the momentum yields a spin mixed state, with the entropy dependent on the deviation of metric from the flat spacetime. The decoherence occurs even if the particle is static in the gravitational field.

10 pages