Emergence of Classical Objectivity of Quantum Darwinism in a Photonic Quantum Simulator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how classical objectivity emerges from quantum systems via quantum Darwinism, using a six-photon quantum simulator to observe information proliferation and suppression of quantum correlations in environmental photons.

Contribution

First experimental verification of quantum Darwinism's role in establishing classical objectivity using photonic quantum simulation.

Findings

Redundancy of classical information observed in environmental photons

Suppression of quantum correlations in environmental fragments

Experimental support for quantum Darwinism in quantum-to-classical transition

Abstract

Quantum-to-classical transition is a fundamental open question in physics frontier. Quantum decoherence theory points out that the inevitable interaction with environment is a sink carrying away quantum coherence, which is responsible for the suppression of quantum superposition in open quantum system. Recently, quantum Darwinism theory further extends the role of environment, serving as communication channel, to explain the classical objectivity emerging in quantum measurement process. Here, we used a six-photon quantum simulator to investigate classical and quantum information proliferation in quantum Darwinism process. In the simulation, many environmental photons are scattered from an observed quantum system and they are collected and used to infer the system's state. We observed redundancy of system's classical information and suppression of quantum correlation in the fragments of environmental photons. Our results experimentally show that the classical objectivity of quantum system can be established through quantum Darwinism mechanism.