| Quantum mechanics possesses a nonintuitive feature which makes it difficult to interpret consistently: A generic quantum state can not be thought of as a classical statistical ensemble. Empirically, however, some things do behave as classical ensembles; for example, a measurement process produces a statistical ensemble of results, although a simple quantum mechanical calculation fails to verify this. The same could be said of everything in the "classical" world of our experience, where quantum effects are completely absent but it is not clear why. A formalism for systematically expressing these interference effects, developed by Griffiths, Omnes, and Gell-Mann and Hartle, is called the decohering histories formulation of quantum mechanics, and its fundamental notions are histories (sequences of events at a succession of times) and a decoherence functional, which measures the interference between histories. They suggest that quantum mechanics is properly thought of as a theory of closed systems in which only histories that diagonalize the decoherence functional actually occur, guaranteeing the absence of interference. I first explain why such a formalism is even necessary by deriving the most general form for an interference term and explaining why these terms pose an interpretive problem; then I describe the decoherence formulation. Next I consider decoherence as a geometrical condition in the space of linear operators on a Hilbert space; I use it to discuss exhaustively the types of decohering histories allowed in a finite dimensional state space, and I conclude that they cannot describe complicated stochastic processes. I also comment on the consequences of these results for systems with larger Hilbert spaces. Then I discuss attempts to demonstrate that decoherence occurs dynamically in the macroscopic world and in measurement situations; I exhibit a simple model of my own and I discuss the results of others, and I conclude that the calculations that are necessary to show classicality have not yet been performed (diagonalizing reduced density matrices is not enough). Finally, I suggest two issues which if resolved would make the decoherence formalism a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics. |
