Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 522

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 18 of the 18 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Intrinsic decoherence in quantum mechanics

Milburn, G. J.·1991·Physical Review A
DOI 10.1103/physreva.44.5401
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

A model for intrinsic decoherence in quantum mechanics is proposed, based on a simple modification of unitary Schr\"odinger evolution. On sufficiently small time scales the system evolves by a random sequence of unitary phase changes generated by the Hamiltonian. The Schr\"odinger equation is obtained to zeroth order in the expansion parameter. Higher-order corrections lead to a loss of coherence in the energy basis. The rate of coherence loss becomes very large as the energy scale of the system is increased. The expansion parameter determines an uncertainty in the time step on very short times scales. A number of testable consequences are derived including anomalous dispersion of a free particle, decay of oscillatory systems, destruction of interference-fringe visibility, and a phase shift of interference fringes.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1103/physreva.44.5401

Cites

18 of 18 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 18 references

Cited by

See all 522

Metadata

Authors
Milburn, G. J.
Venue
Physical Review A
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Published
1991-11-01
Volume
44
Issue
9
Pages
5401-5406
ISSN
  • 0556-2791 (ISSN-L)
  • 1050-2947
  • 1094-1622
DOI
10.1103/physreva.44.5401
OpenAlex
W1971358385
Cited by
522
References
18
FWCI
2.51
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Intrinsic decoherence in quantum mechanics. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1103/physreva.44.5401
The paper
Milburn, G. J. (1991). Intrinsic decoherence in quantum mechanics. Physical Review A. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.44.5401

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.