Talk:Quantum decoherence

Latest comment: 6 days ago by Johnjbarton in topic Puzzling and incorrect lede

Pure state??? edit

How can anyone write an article on decoherence and not define a pure state?????????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Koitus~nlwiki (talkcontribs) 16:37, 3 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

pedagogical lecture on decoherence and quantum measurement edit

I'd like to add a reference to a recent arXiv paper relevant to this article. It is a short pedagogical lecture aimed at students of quantum mechanics which explains the modern viewpoint on decoherence and its relation to the measurement problem.


Perhaps a more experienced editor (like @StarryGrandma) can suggest a place to add it to the article, with a description similar to the above or to the abstract below.


https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02391


Title: Decoherence and Quantum Measurement: The Missing Lecture

Abstract: We give an elementary account of quantum measurement and related topics from the modern perspective of decoherence. The discussion should be comprehensible to students who have completed a basic course in quantum mechanics with exposure to concepts such as Hilbert space, density matrices, and von Neumann projection (``wavefunction collapse''). Zenmach (talk) 21:01, 3 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Zenmach, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a place to publicize someone's unpublished lecture. See Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, particularly the section on textbooks, which says "The purpose of Wikipedia is to summarize accepted knowledge, not to teach subject matter." StarryGrandma (talk) 22:10, 3 January 2023 (UTC)Reply

Intro section way to long. edit

The intro tends attract additions in articles but per WP:SO it should be "a concise summary of the article". Johnjbarton (talk) 02:01, 27 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

I made a series of organizational edits so address this issue. Some of the content here deleted as duplicate or too detailed and unreferenced (meaning we can't judge if the detail is important or not). Johnjbarton (talk) 02:32, 27 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Puzzling and incorrect lede edit

The first sentence says:

  • Quantum decoherence is the loss of quantum coherence, the process in which a system's behaviour changes from that which can be explained by quantum mechanics to that which can be explained by classical mechanics.

The sentence makes no sense: does "the process" refer to coherence or decoherence? We can infer the latter, but then the sentence would be disputed. See

  • A J Leggett 2002 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 14 R415 DOI 10.1088/0953-8984/14/15/201

Johnjbarton (talk) 17:16, 4 May 2024 (UTC)Reply