Emergence of Classicality: From Collapse Phenomenologies to Hybrid Dynamics

Abstract

In the past ten-fifteen years, stochastic models of continuous wave function collapse were being proposed to describe the continuous emergence of classicality from quantum. We advocate that the hybrid dynamics of canonically coupled quantum and classical systems is a more basic concept. Continuous collapse formalisms are obtained as special cases. To illustrate our claim we show how von Neumann collapse follows from hybrid dynamical equations.

8pp LaTeX (Springer-macros), to appear in Decoherence: Theoretical, Experimental and Conceptual Problems (Springer). Minor corrections