On the Definition of Decoherence

Abstract

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 definition of decoherence which incorporates both of these ideas, and show that it leads to a consistent probabilistic interpretation of the reduced density operator.

10 pages, LaTeX, SJSU/TP-93-10

References in corpus (2)

• Classical Equations for Quantum Systems
• Alternative Decohering Histories in Quantum Mechanics

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