Theoretical Physics

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DOI: 10.22606/tp.2016.11006

• Chris Fields^*
  243 West Spain Street, Sonoma, United States

Within the quantum Darwinist framework introduced by W. H. Zurek (Nat. Phys., 5:181-188, 2009), observers obtain effectively-classical pointer-state information about quantum systems by interacting with local samples of the surrounding environment, e.g. local samples of the ambient photon field. Quantum Darwinism requires the environment to encode such effectivelyclassical information uniformly and hence redundantly throughout its entire volume, making the information equally available to all possible observers regardless of their locations. This framework is applied to the observation of stellar center-of-mass positions, which are assumed to be encoded by the ambient photon field with sufficient redundancy to be uniformly accessible at all locations within our observable universe. Assuming Landauer’s Principle, constructing such an environmental encoding requires (ln2)kT per encoded classical bit. For the observed 10²⁴ stars and a uniform binary encoding of center-of-mass positions into voxels with a linear dimension of 5 km, the free energy required at the current CMB temperature T = 2.7 K is  2.5 · 10⁻²⁷ kg · m⁻³, strikingly close to the observed value of Ω_Λρc. Decreasing the voxel size to (lP)³ results in a free energy requirement 10¹¹⁷ times larger.

Classicality, critical density, dark sector, environment as witness, landauer’s principle, quantum Darwinism

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