Reduction of the Wavepacket: How Long Does it Take?

Details Reduction of the Wavepacket: How Long Does it Take? Reduction of the Wavepacket: How Long Does it Take?

2003-02-05

arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0302044v1

Physics

Quantum Physics

7 pages. This paper introduced what is now known as "decoherence timescale" and gave a now broadly used estimate, Eq.(1), for

Scientific paper

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 $\tau$. 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 $\tau/N^2$. Therefore, in the classical limit $\hbar \to 0$ dynamical reversibility $(\tau \to \infty)$ is compatible with ``instantaneous'' coherence loss.

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