Decoherence, branching, and the Born rule in a mixed-state Everettian multiverse
- Creators
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Chua, Eugene Y. S.1, 2
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Chen, Eddy Keming3
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1.
Nanyang Technological University
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
University of California, San Diego
Abstract
In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wavefunction. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we discuss the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend arguments for the Born rule to this setting. This extended framework provides a unification of ‘classical’ and ‘quantum’ probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture.
Copyright and License (English)
Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Acknowledgement (English)
For helpful discussions, we thank Jeffrey Barrett, Kelvin McQueen, Katie Robertson, Simon Saunders, Charles Sebens, Tony Short, Karim Thébault, and David Wallace, several anonymous referees, and the participants at the 2023 Workshop on Relational Clocks, Decoherence, and the Arrow of Time at the University of Bristol, the Philosophy of Physics Society meeting at the 2024 Pacific APA, and the 2022 California Quantum Interpretation Network Conference at Chapman University.
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Additional details
- John Templeton Foundation
- 63209
- Caltech groups
- Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS)
- Publication Status
- Published