Related papers: Probability in decoherent histories
We examine the relationship between the decoherence of quantum-mechanical histories of a closed system (as discussed by Gell-Mann and Hartle) and environmentally-induced diagonalization of the density operator for an open system. We study a…
Quantum theory does not only predict probabilities, but also relative phases for any experiment, that involves measurements of an ensemble of systems at different moments of time. We argue, that any operational formulation of quantum theory…
Quantum decoherence plays a pivotal role in the dynamical description of the quantum-to-classical transition and is the main impediment to the realization of devices for quantum information processing. This paper gives an overview of the…
The best developed formulation of closed system quantum theory that handles multiple-time statements, is the consistent (or decoherent) histories approach. The most important weaknesses of the approach is that it gives rise to many…
The additivity of classical probabilities is only the first in a hierarchy of possible sum-rules, each of which implies its successor. The first and most restrictive sum-rule of the hierarchy yields measure-theory in the Kolmogorov sense,…
We develop a new formalism for constructing probabilities associated to the causal ordering of events in quantum theory, where by an event we mean the emergence of a measurement record on a detector. We start with constructing probabilities…
The true dynamical randomness is obtained as a natural fundamental property of deterministic quantum systems. It provides quantum chaos passing to the classical dynamical chaos under the ordinary semiclassical transition, which extends the…
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…
In the following we revisit the frequency interpretation of probability of Richard von Mises, in order to bring the essential implicit notions in focus. Following von Mises, we argue that probability can only be defined for events that can…
The measurement problem is the issue of explaining how the objective classical world emerges from a quantum one. Here we take a different approach. We assume that there is an objective classical system, and then ask that the standard rules…
The probability `measure' for measurements at two consecutive moments of time is non-additive. These probabilities, on the other hand, may be determined by the limit of relative frequency of measured events, which are by nature additive. We…
We introduce quantum history states and their mathematical framework, thereby reinterpreting and extending the consistent histories approach to quantum theory. Through thought experiments, we demonstrate that our formalism allows us to…
For a system consisting of a large collection of particles, a set of variables that will generally become effectively classical are the local densities (number, momentum, energy). That is, in the context of the decoherent histories approach…
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.…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…
The so-called classical limit of quantum mechanics is generally studied in terms of the decoherence of the state operator that characterizes a system. This is not the only possible approach to decoherence. In previous works we have…
It was pointed out recently [A. Kent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (1997) 2874] that the consistent histories approach allows contrary inferences to be made from the same data. These inferences correspond to projections $P$ and $Q$, belonging to…
Traditional interpretations of quantum theory in terms of wave function collapse are particularly unappealing when considering the universe as a whole, where there is no clean separation between classical observer and quantum system and…
In this article we propose a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. We point out that the measurement problem can be traced to an a priori notion of classicality in the formulation of quantum mechanics. If this notion of…