Quantum Darwinism in non-ideal environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Quantum Darwinism, the process by which classical objectivity emerges from quantum systems, persists even when the environment starts in a non-ideal, mixed state, revealing the conditions for effective information proliferation.

Contribution

It extends Quantum Darwinism analysis to non-ideal environments, showing robustness and quantifying how initial environmental states affect information redundancy and decoherence.

Findings

Redundant information transfer is linked to the environment's entropy increase.

Non-ideal environments with high initial entropy have reduced information acquisition.

Universal scaling relations describe information redundancy regardless of initial system state.

Abstract

Quantum Darwinism provides an information-theoretic framework for the emergence of the objective, classical world from the quantum substrate. The key to this emergence is the proliferation of redundant information throughout the environment where observers can then intercept it. We study this process for a purely decohering interaction when the environment, E, is in a non-ideal (e.g., mixed) initial state. In the case of good decoherence, that is, after the pointer states have been unambiguously selected, the mutual information between the system, S, and an environment fragment, F, is given solely by F's entropy increase. This demonstrates that the environment's capacity for recording the state of S is directly related to its ability to increase its entropy. Environments that remain nearly invariant under the interaction with S, either because they have a large initial entropy or a misaligned initial state, therefore have a diminished ability to acquire information. To elucidate the concept of good decoherence, we show that - when decoherence is not complete - the deviation of the mutual information from F's entropy change is quantified by the quantum discord, i.e., the excess mutual information between S and F is information regarding the initial coherence between pointer states of S. In addition to illustrating these results with a single qubit system interacting with a multi-qubit environment, we find scaling relations for the redundancy of information acquired by the environment that display a universal behavior independent of the initial state of S. Our results demonstrate that Quantum Darwinism is robust with respect to non-ideal initial states of the environment: the environment almost always acquires redundant information about the system but its rate of acquisition can be reduced.