Dark Matter as a Decoupling Effect

This work proposes an alternative explanation for the phenomena usually attributed to dark matter. Instead of introducing a new particle species, the framework treats dark matter as a decoupling effect of horizon information. The cosmological horizon encodes information in two sectors: locked bits, which correspond to baryonic matter, and unlocked bits, which remain in superpositional states. The unlocked sector plays a dual role. On global scales, it behaves as a homogeneous energy density consistent with dark energy. On local scales, it enhances the gravitational potential, creating the additional pull that observers interpret as dark matter. This approach offers a unified origin for both dark sectors within a single horizon-based description. The paper develops the formalism of this decoupling mechanism, defines the effective contribution of the unlocked sector, and confronts the predictions with several empirical tests. These include galaxy rotation curves, the unexpectedly massive early galaxies observed by JWST, weak lensing and redshift-space distortion surveys, and the Bullet Cluster. The analysis shows that the decoupling effect reproduces galactic and cluster-scale gravitational phenomena while remaining consistent with cosmological bounds at the percent level. The framework therefore provides a falsifiable alternative to particle dark matter, predicting measurable scale- and epoch-dependent deviations that upcoming surveys such as Euclid, LSST, and CMB-S4 will be able to confirm or rule out.