Dynamical disappearance of superposition states in the thermodynamic limit
Abstract
It is shown that a macroscopic superposition state of radiation, strongly interacting with an ensemble of two-level atoms, is removed generating a coherent state describing a classical radiation field, when the thermodynamic limit is taken on the unitary evolution obtained by the Schroedinger equation. Decoherence appears as a dynamical effect in agreement with a recent proposal [M. Frasca, Phys. Lett. A 283, 271 (2001)]. To prove that this effect is quite general, we show that this same behavior appears when a superposition of two Fock number states is also considered. Higher order corrections are computed showing that this result tends to become exact in the thermodynamic limit. It appears as a genuine example of intrinsic collapse of the wave function.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0212119,
title = {Dynamical disappearance of superposition states in the thermodynamic limit},
author = {Marco Frasca},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0212119},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
15 pages, no figures. Revised version accepted for publication in Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics