Weak Decoherence and Quantum Trajectory Graphs

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. CPP-94-33 In response to the increasingly popular opinion that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics raises more questions than it answers [7] and a desire to treat the entire universe quantum mechanically, Gell-Mann and Hartle [1, 2, 3] have worked to create an alternative interpretation of quantum theory, expanding upon earlier work by Griffiths [4] and Omnès [6]. Their scheme emphasizes not individual events but Griffiths’ notion of a history, a sequence of events at a succession of times, and they assert that the ∗[email protected]