Cosmic Spinning Top: Gravity vs. Quantum Superpositions ✦

Original: "A post-Newtonian Gravitational Collapse Model from Linearized Gravity"

· Rudi B. P. Pietsch, Luciano Petruzziello, Martin B. Plenio

arXiv:2605.12172v1 · 2026-05-12 · CC BY 4.0 · ⏱ 1 min · Quantum Physics General Relativity

The gravitomagnetic field, gravity’s magnetic twin, unexpectedly emerged as a destroyer of quantum superpositions—a new twist in the hunt for quantum gravity.

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Pulsars—cosmic quantum laboratories: their rotation at 15% of lightspeed spawns gravitomagnetic noise that kills quantum superpositions. Gravity, like a lathe, shears uncertainty off spinning masses. This new decoherence mechanism paves the way to testing quantum gravity—we might witness how the classical world is born.

🎯 The fastest man-made rotors—levitating nanospheres—spin at 6 GHz, with a surface speed of a tiny 0.0016% of lightspeed. Meanwhile, nature’s record holder, the millisecond pulsar PSR J1748-2446ad, spins 716 times per second, with its surface racing at nearly 15% of lightspeed. Nature gives us ready-made quantum labs on a cosmic scale!

🎬 In Robert L. Forward’s novel Dragon's Egg, life on a neutron star is governed by monstrous gravity and furious rotation. Perhaps such worlds are natural testbeds for the post-Newtonian quantum effects predicted in this paper.

L_{\text{rot}} \hat{\sigma} = -\frac{1}{2\hbar^2} \int d^3x d^3y D^{kl}_A(\vec{x}, \vec{y}) \chi_{ki;lm}(\vec{x}, \vec{y}) [\hat{L}_i, [\hat{L}_m, \hat{\sigma}]]

Here D^{kl}_A is the gravitomagnetic noise correlator, χ involves the inertia tensor and Levi-Civita symbols, and ˆL_i are angular momentum operator components. The double commutator drives decoherence in the angular momentum basis.

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Cosmic Spinning Top: Gravity vs. Quantum Superpositions ✦