Record Details

Amplification, Redundancy, and Quantum Chernoff Information

ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

Field Value
Title Amplification, Redundancy, and Quantum Chernoff Information
Names Zwolak, Michael (creator)
Riedel, C. Jess (creator)
Zurek, Wojciech H. (creator)
Date Issued 2014-04-11 (iso8601)
Note This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the American Physical Society and can be found at: http://journals.aps.org/prl/.
Abstract Amplification was regarded, since the early days of quantum theory, as a mysterious ingredient that
endows quantum microstates with macroscopic consequences, key to the “collapse of the wave packet,”
and a way to avoid embarrassing problems exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat. Such a bridge between the
quantum microworld and the classical world of our experience was postulated ad hoc in the Copenhagen
interpretation. Quantum Darwinism views amplification as replication, in many copies, of the information
about quantum states. We show that such amplification is a natural consequence of a broad class of models
of decoherence, including the photon environment we use to obtain most of our information. This leads
to objective reality via the presence of robust and widely accessible records of selected quantum states.
The resulting redundancy (the number of copies deposited in the environment) follows from the quantum
Chernoff information that quantifies the information transmitted by a typical elementary subsystem of the
environment.
Genre Article
Identifier Zwolak, M., Riedel, C. J., & Zurek, W. H. (2014). Amplification, Redundancy, and Quantum Chernoff Information. Physical Review Letters, 112(14), 140406. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.140406

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