Phase-space decoherence: A comparison between consistent histories and environment-induced superselection

Phase-space decoherence: A comparison between consistent histories and environment-induced superselection.

We examine the decoherence properties of a quantum open system as modeled by a quantum optical system in the Markov regime. We look for decoherence in both the Environment Induced Superselection (EIS) and Consistent Histories (CH) frameworks. We propose a general measure of the coherence of the reduced density matrix and find that EIS decoherence occurs in a number of bases for this model. The ...

The Decoherence of Phase Space Histories

In choosing a family of histories for a system, it is often convenient to choose a succession of locations in phase space, rather than configuration space, for comparison to classical histories. Although there are no good projections onto phase space, several approximate projections have been used in the past; three of these are examined in this paper. Expressions are derived for the probabilit...

Quantum limit of decoherence: Environment induced superselection of energy eigenstates

The relevance of decoherence in the context of the quantum to classical transition has been recently recognized [1–3]. The basic idea is that classicality is an emergent property induced in open quantum systems by their environments. Due to the interaction with the environment, the vast majority of states in the Hilbert space of a quantum open system become highly unstable to entangling interac...

Decoherence and classical predictability of phase-space histories.

We consider the decoherence of phase space histories in quantum brownian motion models, consisting of a particle moving under a potential V (x) in contact with a heat bath of temperature T and dissipation constant γ in the Markovian regime. The evolution of the density operator for this system is thus described by a non-unitary master equation. The phase space histories are described by quasipr...

Environment-induced decoherence, classicality, and consistency of quantum histories.