Decoherence without the state: A causal quantum Darwinist approach

Abstract

The consistent histories formalism can be used to describe histories comprised of events across many systems, times, and places, plausibly rich enough to describe our experiences of the classical world; however, many consistent history sets are nonclassical and thus not obviously relevant to our experiences. Meanwhile, the program of environmentally induced decoherence identifies dynamically privileged classical degrees of freedom, but provides no general account of when or how many such degrees of freedom consistently combine to form histories. This work shows that the strengths of these two approaches can be combined by adopting a dynamics-first perspective on decoherence. Inspired by quantum causal models and quantum Darwinism, we define the process of decoherence in terms of the causal influences through unitary dynamics required for the proliferation of information about observables. We characterise decoherence as a property of the unitary dynamics, without presupposing the existence of any quantum state. Instead, we show that the state emerges from dual decoherence, related to decoherence by time-reversal of the unitary dynamics. Indeed, for any set of systems in an arbitrary unitary circuit, decoherence and its dual single out a privileged consistent history set -- and we demonstrate through examples that states emerge from dual decoherence while outcomes emerge from decoherence. Hence the idea that quantum states emerge from the process of decoherence turns out to be the key missing ingredient for unifying environmentally induced decoherence and consistent histories. Taking this idea ontologically seriously leads to a recently proposed causal interpretation of quantum theory or a dynamics-first version of the Everett interpretation. The causal approach also sheds light on the suppression of off-diagonal terms, time asymmetry, and robustness of the pointer basis.