Related papers: Decoherence properties of arbitrarily long histori…
We review the application of the consistent (or decoherent) histories formulation of quantum theory to canonical loop quantum cosmology. Conventional quantum theory relies crucially on "measurements" to convert unrealized quantum…
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…
We investigate the idea that decoherence is connected with the storage of information about the decohering system somewhere in the universe. The known connection between decoherence of histories and the existence of records is extended from…
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…
Griffiths' ``quantum trajectories'' formalism is extended to describe weak decoherence. The decoherence conditions are shown to severely limit the complexity of histories composed of fine-grained events.
Decoherence in quantum computer memory due to the inevitable coupling to the external environment is examined. We take the assumption that all quantum bits (qubits) interact with the same environment rather than the assumption of separate…
The prototypical Schr\"{o}dinger cat state, i.e., an initial state corresponding to two widely separated Gaussian wave packets, is considered. The decoherence time is calculated solely within the framework of elementary quantum mechanics…
For a quantum field living on a non - static spacetime no instantaneous Hamiltonian is definable, for this generically necessitates a choice of inequivalent representation of the canonical commutation relations at each instant of time. This…
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…
The physics of low-energy quantum systems is usually studied without explicit consideration of the background spacetime. Phenomena inherent to quantum theory on curved space-time, such as Hawking radiation, are typically assumed to be only…
Various physical effects resulting from decoherence are discussed in the algebraic framework. In particular, it is shown that the environment may induce not only classical properties like superselection rules, pointer states or even…
The use of a relational time in quantum mechanics is a framework in which one promotes to quantum operators all variables in a system, and later chooses one of the variables to operate like a ``clock''. Conditional probabilities are…
With a choice of boundary conditions for solutions of the Schr\"odinger equation, state vectors and density operators even for closed systems evolve asymmetrically in time. For open systems, standard quantum mechanics consequently predicts…
The formalism for histories-based generalized quantum mechanics developed in two earlier papers is applied to the treatment of histories (of particles or fields or more general objects) in curved spacetimes (which need not admit foliation…
In this universe, governed fundamentally by quantum mechanical laws, characterized by indeterminism and distributed probabilities, classical deterministic laws are applicable over a wide range of time, place, and scale. We review the origin…
We use a $\lambda\Phi^4$ scalar quantum field theory to illustrate a new approach to the study of quantum to classical transition. In this approach, the decoherence functional is employed to assign probabilities to consistent histories…
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…
This dissertation investigates questions arising in the consistent histories formulation of the quantum mechanics of closed systems. Various criteria for approximate consistency are analysed. The connection between the Dowker-Halliwell…
This paper is generally concerned with understanding how the uncertainty principle arises in formulations of quantum mechanics, such as the decoherent histories approach, whose central goal is the assignment of probabilities to 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…