self-decoherence criterion for quantum histories

Nisticò G., Roberto Beneduci

Giuseppe Nisticò, Roberto Beneduci

Ian Staley

This paper develops a formal reconstruction, within the Gell-Mann–Hartle decoherent-histories framework, of the Campbell–Owhadi observer-rendering criterion familiar from simulation-theoretic quantum mechanics. Under an explicit records-theoretic reading of "information available to an observer," the rendering criterion corresponds to a decoherence-functional condition weighted by algorithmic-information distance on observer records. The construction is metaphysically neutral: the parameter K may equally be read as a literal simulator budget or as a resource bound on observer-internal record consolidation. The author defines a pruning admissibility functional A(α | O, K) and establishes a correspondence in which Campbell–Owhadi rendering events coincide with transitions across the pruning-admissibility boundary. The framework recovers standard decoherent-histories statistics (Born rule, medium decoherence) in the limit K → ∞. For finite K, a heuristic derivation yields a complementary-error-function form, saturating at the contextuality/Bell margin, for the predicted sub-Tsirelson and sub-Klyachko–Can–Binicioğlu–Shumovsky deviations and for the threshold structure in delayed-choice eraser visibility. Two photonic protocols on existing single-photon platforms are proposed, at estimated costs of approximately $180k each in an existing facility or $200–400k from scratch.

J. Weyers

Philipp Strasberg, Joseph Schindler, Jiaozi Wang +1 more

Using the framework of decoherent histories, we study which past events leave detectable records in isolated quantum systems under the realistic assumption that decoherence is approximate and not perfect. In the first part we establish -- asymptotically for a large class of (pseudo-)random histories -- that the number of reliable records can be much smaller than the number of possible events, depending on the degree of decoherence. In the second part we reveal a clear decoherence structure for long histories based on a numerically exact solution of a random matrix model that, as we argue, captures generic aspects of decoherence. We observe recoherence between histories with a small Hamming distance, for localized histories admitting a high purity Petz recovery state, and for maverick histories that are statistical outliers with respect to Born's rule. From the perspective of the Many Worlds Interpretation, the first part -- which views the self-location problem as a coherent version of quantum state discrimination -- reveals a "branch selection problem", and the second part sheds light on the emergence of Born's rule and the theory confirmation problem.

J. J. Halliwell