Related papers: Strong Decoherence
Within the histories formalism the decoherence functional is a formal tool to investigate the emergence of classicality in isolated quantum systems, yet an explicit evaluation of it from first principles has not been reported. We provide…
This paper discusses the relation between the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics that is based on coarse-grained decoherent histories of a closed system, and the approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems, as in…
Decoherence is the process via which quantum superpositions states are reduced to classical mixtures. Decoherence has been predicted for relativistically accelerated quantum systems, however examples to date have involved restricting the…
Reference frames are of special importance in physics. They are usually considered to be idealized entities. However, in most situations, e.g. in laboratories, physical processes are described within reference frames constituted by physical…
The theory of decoherent histories is an attempt to derive classical physics from positing only quantum laws at the fundamental level without notions of a classical apparatus or collapse of the wave-function. Searching for a marked target…
We use the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory to derive the form of an effective theory describing the coupling of classical and quantum variables. The derivation is carried out for a system consisting of a large particle…
The origin of the phenomenological deterministic laws that approximately govern the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience is considered in the context of the quantum mechanics of closed systems such as the universe as a whole. We…
A distinction is made between two kinds of consistent histories: (1) robust histories consistent by virtue of decoherence, and (2) verifiable histories consistent through the existence of accessible records. It is events in verifiable…
Environment induced decoherence entails the absence of quantum interference phenomena from the macroworld. The loss of coherence between superposed wave packets depends on their separation. The precise temporal course depends on the…
In the histories formulation of quantum theory, sets of coarse-grained histories that are consistent obey the classical probability rules. It has been argued that these sets can describe the quasi-classical behaviour of closed quantum…
Selection of the preferred classical set of states in the process of decoherence -- so important for cosmological considerations -- is discussed with an emphasis on the role of information loss and entropy. {\it Persistence of correlations}…
This paper explores the possibility that an exactly decoherent set of histories may be constructed from an approximately decoherent set by small distortions of the operators characterizing the histories. In particular, for the case of…
A system of quantum reasoning for a closed system is developed by treating non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory. The sample space corresponds to a decomposition, as a sum of orthogonal projectors, of the identity…
We find the conditions for one quantum system to function as a classical controller of another quantum system: the controller must be an open system and rapidly diagonalised in the basis of the controller variable that is coupled to the…
A model quantum cosmology is used to illustrate how arrows of time emerge in a universe governed by a time-neutral dynamical theory constrained by time asymmetric initial and final boundary conditions represented by initial and final…
We investigate the quantum theory of closed systems based on the linear positivity decoherence condition of Goldstein and Page. A quantum theory of closed systems requires two elements; 1) a condition specifying which sets of histories may…
We consider environment induced decoherence of quantum superpositions to mixtures in the limit in which that process is much faster than any competing one generated by the Hamiltonian $H_{\rm sys}$ of the isolated system. While the golden…
We study the emergence of decoherent histories in isolated systems based on exact numerical integration of the Schr\"odinger equation for a Heisenberg chain. We reveal that the nature of the system, which we switch from (i) chaotic to (ii)…
The geometry of decoherence in generalized "consistent histories" quantum theory is explored, revealing properties of the theory that are independent of any particular application of it. It is shown how the decoherence functional of a…
A generalized formal framework for decoherence, that can be used both in open and closed quantum systems, is sketched. In this context, the relationship between the decoherence of a closed system and the decoherence of its subsystems is…