Eur. Phys. J. D 44, 319-326 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2007-00191-8

A quantum trajectory description of decoherence

¹ Instituto de Matemáticas y Física Fundamental, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Serrano 123, 28006 Madrid, Spain
² Departamento de Química, C–IX, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain

Corresponding author: ^a f.borondo@uam.es

Received: 30 November 2006
Revised: 16 April 2007
Published online: 13 June 2007

Abstract

A complete theoretical treatment in many problems relevant to physics, chemistry, and biology requires considering the action of the environment over the system of interest. Usually the environment involves a relatively large number of degrees of freedom, this making the problem numerically intractable from a purely quantum-mechanical point of view. To overcome this drawback, a new class of quantum trajectories is proposed. These trajectories, based on the same grounds as Bohmian ones, are solely associated to the system reduced density matrix, since the evolution of the environment degrees of freedom is not considered explicitly. Within this approach, environment effects come into play through a time-dependent damping factor that appears in the system equations of motion. Apart from their evident computational advantage, this type of trajectories also results very insightful to understand the system decoherence. In particular, here we show the usefulness of these trajectories analyzing decoherence effects in interference phenomena, taking as a working model the well-known double-slit experiment.