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7 - Quantum Darwinism: Environment as a Witness

from Part III - Quantum Darwinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2025

Wojciech Hubert Zurek
Affiliation:
Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Summary

The aim in Chapter 7 is to take into account the role of the means of information transmission on the nature of the states that can be perceived. Our point of departure is the recognition that the information we obtain is acquired by observers who monitor fragments of the same environment that decohered the system, einselecting preferred pointer states in the process. Moreover, we only intercept a fraction of the environment. The only information about the system that can be transmitted by its fraction must have been reproduced in many copies in that environment. This process of amplification limits what can be found out to the states einselected by decoherence. Quantum Darwinism provides a simple and natural explanation of this restriction, and, hence, of the objective existence—the essence of classicality—for the einselected states. This chapter introduces and develops information-theoretic tools and concepts (including, e.g., redundancy) that allow one to explore and characterize correlations and information flows between systems, environments, and observers, and illustrates them on an exactly solvable yet non-trivial model.

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Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism
From Quantum Foundations to Classical Reality
, pp. 193 - 229
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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