Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Physics

Reader 1

Kevin Setter

Reader 2

Scot Gould

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Rights Information

© 2023 Mahima Kumar

Abstract

Quantum Darwinism (QD) seeks to explain the emergence of the objective reality of the classical world from the underlying quantum physics. According to QD, the process of decoherence leaves a joint quantum state of a system and its environment in special states with non-generic properties. In particular, these special states allow information about the state of a system to be redundantly imprinted in many distinct fragments of the environment. The objectivity of post-decoherence states is quantified with a Partial Information Plot (PIP) exhibiting a characteristic classical plateau. The account of QD implicitly relies on a particular way of dividing the environment into sub-systems, corresponding to a choice of Tensor Product Structure (TPS) of the total Hilbert Space. Here, we investigate the role of this implicit TPS layer of structure in QD. We simulate a central system qubit independently interacting with a series of environment qubits and generate PIPs graphing post-interaction quantum mutual information between the system and environment fragments of various sizes. We then perform a unitary “scrambling” of the division into sub-environments, recalculate the quantum mutual informations, and compare the unscrambled and scrambled systems. In showing that the scrambled states no longer display redundancy, our results suggest that some choices of TPS are more optimal than others for admitting an account of Quantum Darwinism.

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