Related papers: Two theories of decoherence
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
The relationship between classical and quantum theory is of central importance to the philosophy of physics, and any interpretation of quantum mechanics has to clarify it. Our discussion of this relationship is partly historical and…
We begin by discussing ``What exists?'', i.e. ontology, in Classical Physics which provided a description of physical phenomena at the macroscopic level. The microworld however necessitates a introduction of Quantum ideas for its…
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…
Answers to the question how a classical world emerges from underlying quantum physics are revisited, connected and extended as follows. First, three distinct concepts are compared: decoherence in open quantum systems, consistent/decoherent…
Decoherence is widely felt to have something to do with the quantum measurement problem, but getting clear on just what is made difficult by the fact that the "measurement problem", as traditionally presented in foundational and…
The decoherence of quantum states defines the transition between the quantum world and classical physics. Decoherence or, analogously, quantum mechanical collapse events pose fundamental questions regarding the interpretation of quantum…
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…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
Everett's relative states interpretation of quantum mechanics has met with problems related to probability, the preferred basis, and multiplicity. The third theme, I argue, is the most important one. It has led to developments of the…
The paper investigates the type of realism that best suits the framework of decoherence taken at face value without postulating a plurality of worlds, or additional hidden variables, or non-unitary dynamical mechanisms. It is argued that…
The fact that we rarely directly observe much quantum uncertainty is often attributed to decoherence. However, decoherence does not reduce the quantum uncertainty in the full quantum state. Whether or not it reduces the quantum…
We consider the claim that decoherence explains the emergence of classicality in quantum systems, and conclude that it does not. We show that, given a randomly chosen universe composed of a variety of subsystems, some of which are…
It has been experimentally demonstrated that quantum coherence can persist in macroscopic phenomena [J.R. Friedman et al.,Nature, 406 (2000) 43]. To face the challenge of this new fact, in this article QM in its standard form is assumed to…
At the primary level of reality as described by quantum field theory, a fundamental particle like an electron represents a stable, discrete, propagating excited state of its underlying quantum field. QFT also tells us that the lowest vacuum…
A thought experiment is discussed to clarify the concept of decoherence. Superposition of states consisting of ground state of a single hydrogen atom and its excited state after a huge amount of time is discussed to show that the…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
A small quantum system is studied which is a superposition of states localized in different positions in a static gravitational field. The time evolution of the correlation between different positions is investigated, and it is seen that…
The problem of measurement is often considered as an inconsistency inside the quantum formalism. Many attempts to solve (or to dissolve) it have been made since the inception of quantum mechanics. The form of these attempts depends on the…