What are the systems that decohere?

Abstract

The fact that the Environment Induced Decoherence approach offers no general criterion to decide where to place the "cut" between system and environment has been considered as a serious conceptual problem of the proposal. In this letter we argue that this is actually a pseudo-problem, which is dissolved by the fact that decoherence is a phenomenon relative to the relevant observables selected by the measuring arrangement. We also show that, when the spin-bath model is studied from this perspective, certain unexpected results are obtained, as that of a system decohering in interaction with a very small environment.