2024/05/01 by Emery Doucet, Sebastian Deffner, Doucet, Emery +1 · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Philosophy and History of Science #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.00805
openalex publication_date 2024/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Quantum Darwinism is a paradigm to understand how classically objective reality emerges from within a fundamentally quantum universe. Despite the growing attention that this field of research as been enjoying, it is currently not known what specific properties a given Hamiltonian describing a generic quantum system must have to allow the emergence of classicality. Therefore, in the present work, we consider a broadly applicable generic model of an arbitrary finite-dimensional system interacting with an environment formed from an arbitrary collection of finite-dimensional degrees of freedom via an unspecified, potentially time-dependent Hamiltonian containing at most two-body interaction terms. We show that such models support quantum Darwinism if the set of operators acting on the system which enter the Hamiltonian satisfy a set of commutation relations with a pointer observable and with one other. We demonstrate our results by analyzing a wide range of example systems: a qutrit interacting with a qubit environment, a qubit-qubit model with interactions alternating in time, and a series of collision models including a minimal model of a quantum Maxwell demon.