Our paper “Measuring Decoherence Due to Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations” published on Physical Review Letters.
Vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field vacuum comprise a fundamentally unavoidable environment for a charged particle. Previous works have investigated whether vacuum fluctuations can lead to observable decoherence, when treated as an environment of a charged particle in an open quantum system framework. It has been shown recently that decoherence due to vacuum fluctuations does not arise in ordinary situations and requires a sudden switching on and off of the particle charge. Such a scenario was considered to be unrealistic, since the charge of elementary particles is fixed. However, in this work, we propose a concrete scenario where interaction of the particle with vacuum fluctuations can be switched on and off. Results of the leading order calculations suggest that decoherence due to vacuum fluctuations might even be within the reach of an experimental detection.