Decoherence and Bare Mass Induced by Nonconformal Metric Fluctuations

The effects, upon the Klein–Gordon field, of nonconformal stochastic metric fluctuations, are analyzed. It will be shown that these fluctuations allow us to consider an effective mass, i.e., the mass detected in a laboratory is not the parameter appearing in the Klein–Gordon equation, but a function of this parameter and of the fluctuations of the metric. In other words, in analogy to the case of a nonrelativistic electron in interaction with a quantized electromagnetic field, we may speak of a bare mass, where the observed mass shows a dependence upon the stochastic terms included in the metric. Afterwards, we prove, resorting to the influence functional, that the energy–momentum tensor of the Klein–Gordon field inherites this stochastic behavior, and that this feature provokes decoherence upon a particle immersed in the region where this tensor is present.