Related papers: Alternative Decohering Histories in Quantum Mechan…
We present a formulation of the decoherent (or consistent) histories quantum theory of closed systems starting with records of what histories happen. Alternative routes to a formulation of quantum theory like this one can be useful both for…
I review the decoherent (or consistent) histories approach to quantum mechanics, due to Griffiths, to Gell-Mann and Hartle, and to Omnes. This is an approach to standard quantum theory specifically designed to apply to genuinely closed…
A striking feature of our fundamentally indeterministic quantum universe is its quasiclassical realm -- the wide range of time place and scale in which the deterministic laws of classical physics hold. Our quasiclassical realmis an emergent…
In spite of its popularity, it has not been possible to vindicate the conventional wisdom that classical mechanics is a limiting case of quantum mechanics. The purpose of the present paper is to offer an alternative formulation of classical…
An alternative approach to decoherence, named non-dynamical decoherence is developed and used to resolve the quantum measurement problem. According to decoherence, the observed system is open to a macroscopic apparatus(together with a…
We illustrate the crucial role played by decoherence (consistency of quantum histories) in extracting consistent quantum probabilities for alternative histories in quantum cosmology. Specifically, within a Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a…
This paper is concerned with two questions in the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics: the emergence of approximate classical predictability, and the fluctuations about it necessitated by the uncertainty principle. We…
The inherent difficulty in talking about quantum decoherence in the context of quantum cosmology is that decoherence requires subsystems, and cosmology is the study of the whole Universe. Consistent histories gave a possible answer to this…
The decoherent histories approach is a natural medium in which to address problems in quantum theory which involve time in a non-trivial way. This article reviews the various attempts and difficulties involved in using the decoherent…
We introduce a general method for the construction of quasiprobability representations for arbitrary notions of quantum coherence. Our technique yields a nonnegative probability distribution for the decomposition of any classical state.…
Precise rules are developed in order to formalize the reasoning processes involved in standard non-relativistic quantum mechanics, with the help of analogies from classical physics. A classical or quantum description of a mechanical system…
The decoherence phenomenon arising from an environmental monitoring of the state of a quantum system, as opposed to monitoring of a preferred observable, is worked out in detail using two equivalent formulations, namely, repeated…
By considering (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics as it is done in practice in particular in condensed-matter physics, it is argued that a deterministic, unitary time evolution within a chosen Hilbert space always has a limited scope,…
We consider notions of physical equivalence of sets of histories in the quantum mechanics of a closed system. We show first how the same set of histories can be relabeled in various ways, including the use of the Heisenberg equations of…
In the first part of this paper the general perspective of history quantum theories is reviewed. History quantum theories provide a conceptual and mathematical framework for formulating quantum theories without a globally defined…
A direct classical analog of quantum decoherence is introduced. Similarities and differences between decoherence dynamics examined quantum mechanically and classically are exposed via a second-order perturbative treatment and via a strong…
The consistent histories formalism can be used to describe histories comprised of events across many systems, times, and places, plausibly rich enough to describe our experiences of the classical world; however, many consistent history sets…
In a fundamental formulation of the quantum mechanics of a closed system such as the universe as a whole, three forms of information are needed to make predictions for the probabilities of alternative time histories of the closed system .…
It is shown how all the major conceptual difficulties of standard (textbook) quantum mechanics, including the two measurement problems and the (supposed) nonlocality that conflicts with special relativity, are resolved in the consistent or…
The consistent histories formulation of the quantum theory of a closed system with pure initial state defines an infinite number of incompatible consistent sets, each of which gives a possible description of the physics. We investigate the…