Infrared Quantum Information

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Nov 3;119(18):180502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.180502. Epub 2017 Oct 30.

Abstract

We discuss information-theoretic properties of low-energy photons and gravitons in the S matrix. Given an incoming n-particle momentum eigenstate, we demonstrate that unobserved soft photons decohere nearly all outgoing momentum superpositions of charged particles, while the universality of gravity implies that soft gravitons decohere nearly all outgoing momentum superpositions of all the hard particles. Using this decoherence, we compute the entanglement entropy of the soft bosons and show that it is infrared-finite when the leading divergences are resummed in the manner of Bloch and Nordsieck.