Reduction of the Wavepacket: How Long Does it Take?
| dc.creator | Zurek, Wojciech H. | |
| dc.date | 2003-02-05 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T06:06:04Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T06:06:04Z | |
| dc.description | We show that the ``reduction of the wavepacket'' caused by the interaction with the environment occurs on a timescale which is typically many orders of magnitude shorter than the relaxation timescale $τ$. In particular, we show that in a system interacting with a ``canonical'' heat bath of harmonic oscillators decorrelation timescale of two pieces of the wave-packet separated by $N$ thermal de Broglie wavelengths is approximately $τ/N^2$. Therefore, in the classical limit $\hbar \to 0$ dynamical reversibility $(τ\to \infty)$ is compatible with ``instantaneous'' coherence loss. | |
| dc.description | 7 pages. This paper introduced what is now known as "decoherence timescale" and gave a now broadly used estimate, Eq.(1), for quantum Brownian motion | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302044 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302044 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/90852 | |
| dc.subject | Quantum Physics | |
| dc.title | Reduction of the Wavepacket: How Long Does it Take? | |
| dc.type | text |