Comment on “Indications of energetic consequences of decoherence at short times for scattering from open quantum systems” [AIP Advances 1, 022118 (2011)]

The paper by Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann, Gray and Blach in the title reports measurements on gaseous hydrogen, performed on the VESUVIO electron volt neutron spectrometer at the ISIS neutron source. It was claimed in this paper that the VESUVIO measurements show that, if the energy transfer is sufficiently large that the bond in the H2 molecule is broken, then a larger energy transfer than that predicted by conventional neutron scattering theory occurs. It was also claimed that this is the first evidence for an increase in the energies of the proton and its environment due to quantum disentanglement. It is shown here that this evidence is almost certainly a spurious consequence of errors in the data analysis of Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann et al. When the standard VESUVIO instrument programs are used to analyse the same data on gaseous hydrogen the results obtained are in very good agreement with conventional theory.