Quantifying Decoherence

Quantum decoherence refers to the phenomenon when the interaction of a quantum system with its environment results in the degradation of quantum coherence. Decoherence is considered to be the most popular mechanism responsible for the emergence of classicality from quantum mechanics. The issue of formulating a measure of decoherence is addressed here. The approach taken here is that decoherence results from the entanglement of a quantum system with certain environment degrees of freedom, and quantifying this entanglement should yield the most natural measure of decoherence. A simple measure of decoherence is presented based on this notion, and it is examined for various example systems. The measure proves to be effective and is relatively straightforward to compute. In addition, a method has been proposed to measure decoherence in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer which may be useful in neutron interferometry.