Quantum Physics Commons^™

Existence Of Well-Defined Pointer Observable Selects Tensor Product Factorizations Of Quantum Systems, Brian Lee

CMC Senior Theses

In the decoherence account of quantum mechanics, a choice of particular tensor product structure (a particular partition of system into subsystems) is assumed. We explore whether it is possible to relax this arbitrary choice by requiring that a valid tensor product structure admits a quasi-classical description. Such tensor product structures are said to be quasi-classical or decoherence-selected tensor product structures. This project generalizes a 2-qubit quasi-classical tensor product structure selection algorithm to an n-qubit selection algorithm, which allows us to, for the first time, consider the relationship between decoherence-selected tensor product structures and locality-selected tensor product structures. To generalize the …