David A. Meyer,
``Scale decoherence in inhomogeneous potentials'',
quant-ph/9805039.

Finite precision measurement factors the Hilbert space of a quantum system into a tensor product H_coarse H_fine. This is mathematically equivalent to the partition into system and environment which forms the arena for decoherence, so we describe the consequences of the inaccessibility of H_fine as scale decoherence. Considering the experimentally important case of a harmonic oscillator potential as well as a periodic piecewise constant potential, we show that scale decoherence occurs for inhomogeneous potentials and may explain part of the decoherence observed in recent and proposed experiments on mesoscopic superpositions of quantum states.

PlainTeX (10 pages): PostScript (256K), PDF (172K).