An Alternative to Decoherence by Environment and the Appearance of a Classical World

Abstract

We provide an alternative approach to the decoherence-by-environment paradigm in the field of the quantum measurement process and the appearance of a classical world. In contrast to the decoherence approach we argue that the transition from pure states to mixtures and the appearance of macro objects (and macroscopic properties) can be understood without invoking the measurement-like influence of the environment on the pointer-states of the measuring instrument. We show that every generic many-body system contains within the class of microscopic quantum observables a subalgebra of macro observables, the spectrum of which comprises the macroscopic properties of the many-body system. Our analysis is based (among other things) on two ingenious papers by v.Neumann and v.Kampen.