Emergence of Classical Objectivity of Quantum Darwinism in a Photonic Quantum Simulator
arXiv:1808.07388
The authors use a six‑photon photonic quantum simulator to experimentally study quantum Darwinism, showing that classical information about a system becomes redundant in environmental photons while quantum correlations are suppressed, demonstrating the emergence of classical objectivity.
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.
6 pages, 4 figures, improved version