Progressive Decoherence and Total Environmental Disentanglement

Abstract

The simple stationary decoherence of a two-state quantum system is discussed from a new viewpoint of environmental entanglement. My work emphasizes that an unconditional local state must totally be disentangled from the rest of the universe. It has been known for long that the loss of coherence within the given local system is gradual. Also the quantum correlations between the local system and the rest of the universe are being destroyed gradually. I show that, differently from local decoherence, the process of environmental disentanglement may terminate in finite time. The time of perfect disentanglement turns out to be on the decoherence time scale, and in a simple case we determine the exact value of it.