Of Buckey Balls and SQUIDs: Observing Decoherence in Action

Abstract

Until the mid-1990s, decoherence was mainly studied through theoretical models. As described in Chap. 3, in 1985 Joos and Zeh [7] showed that spatial superposition states of even minuscule objects, such as dust grains or large molecules, are rapidly decohered by the scattering of only minimal environments. Furthermore, the rule-of-thumb expression (2.113) for spatial decoherence rates derived by Zurek in 1984 [12] suggested that on macroscopic scales decoherence would be overwhelmingly more rapid than dissipation. These results led to the common notion that decoherence is extremely efficient and fast, and to the general prediction that any nonclassical superposition in the everyday world would be immediately decohered.