Abstract
In our presentation of decoherence in the previous chapters, an essential ingredient was the separation of a quantum system into a subsystem (called the “relevant” or “distinguished” part) and its environment (called the “irrelevant” or “ignored” part). Provided certain initial conditions hold, “coarsegraining” with respect to the irrelevant degrees of freedom may lead to the emergence of classical behaviour in the relevant part, since (almost) all information about quantum phases has migrated into correlations with the environment and is thus no longer accessible in observations of the subsystem alone.
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References
“Quantum mechanics is best and most fundamentally understood in the framework of quantum cosmology” (Gell-Mann and Hartle 1990).
Although this term is frequently used, we note that it is somewhat misleading, since it is a classical notion, cf. Sect. 9.2.
In Gell-Mann and Hartle (1995) they use this concept for a more restrictive condition.
In more general models, higher inertia can be achieved by increasing the amount of coarse-graining, for example smearing out over a larger volume.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kiefer, C. (2003). Consistent Histories and Decoherence. In: Decoherence and the Appearance of a Classical World in Quantum Theory. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05328-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05328-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-05576-8
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