Abstract
Recent studies of the quantum-mechanical description of measurement and of the emergence of classical behavior in a system described by quantum mechanics have emphasized the interaction of a system with its environment. The usual approach is to derive and solve a master equation for the evolution of the reduced-density operator of the system or to derive and evaluate a path-integral expression for that density operator. In many simple examples it can be shown that interaction with the environment destroys the quantum coherence of the system over time scales much shorter than the systems’ energy-relaxation time. Understanding this phenomenon is obviously crucial in clarifying the connection between classical and quantum-dynamical behavior. However, investigating the details of decoherence has proved a difficult task in the usual master-equation-type approaches.
© 1993 Optical Society of America
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