PIRSA:08090074

Decoherence and the (non)emergence of classicality.

Weinstein, S. (2008). Decoherence and the (non)emergence of classicality.. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/08090074

Weinstein, Steve. Decoherence and the (non)emergence of classicality.. Perimeter Institute, Sep. 29, 2008, https://pirsa.org/08090074 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:08090074,
            doi = {10.48660/08090074},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/08090074},
            author = {Weinstein, Steve},
            keywords = {Quantum Foundations},
            language = {en},
            title = {Decoherence and the (non)emergence of classicality.},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2008},
            month = {sep},
            note = {PIRSA:08090074 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Steve Weinstein University of Waterloo

DOI 10.48660/08090074
Collection
Talk Type Conference
Subject

Abstract

It is widely believed that the dynamical mechanism of decoherence plays a key role in understanding the emergence of classicality from quantum systems, via the environment-induced superselection of a preferred set of subsystem states, the density matrices for which are approximately diagonal in the pointer basis. In this talk, I prove that the vast majority of subsystems do *not* exhibit this behavior, regardless of the Hamiltonian. This shows that the emergence of classicality is highly state-dependent (as suggested by related work of Hartle and others).