19 research outputs found
Entanglement and Nonunitary Evolution
We consider a collapsing relativistic spherical shell for a free quantum
field. Once the center of the wavefunction of the shell passes a certain radius
R, the degrees of freedom inside R are traced over. We show that an observer
outside this region will determine that the evolution of the system is
nonunitary. We argue that this phenomenon is generic to entangled systems, and
discuss a possible relation to black hole physics.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure; Added a clarification regarding the relation with
black hole physic