Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 160
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3404-y

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Horizons and non-local time evolution of quantum mechanical systems

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Bologna, via Irnerio 46, 40126, Bologna, Italy
² Sezione di Bologna, I.N.F.N., via B. Pichat 6/2, 40127, Bologna, Italy

^* e-mail: roberto.casadio@bo.infn.it

Received: 29 November 2014
Accepted: 14 April 2015
Published online: 23 April 2015

Abstract

According to general relativity, trapping surfaces and horizons are classical causal structures that arise in systems with sharply defined energy and corresponding gravitational radius. The latter concept can be extended to a quantum mechanical matter state simply by means of the spectral decomposition, which allows one to define an associated “horizon wave-function”. Since this auxiliary wave-function contains crucial information about the causal structure of space-time, a new proposal is formulated for the time evolution of quantum systems in order to account for the fundamental classical property that outer observers cannot receive signals from inside a horizon. The simple case of a massive free particle at rest is used throughout the paper as a toy model to illustrate the main ideas.