Entanglement, Decoherence and Which-Path Information
Henry attempts to sneak into Eve’s residence undetected by taking advantage of his quantum coherence, but his quantum entanglement with Schred puts him in peril: Henry can no longer interfere with himself, he decoheres, since his two versions are differently tagged by correlations with different versions of Schred. Entanglement in composite systems is not only the hallmark of quantumness but also the key to its demise, alias decoherence. Decoherence, by transforming quantum information into classical information, is the biggest obstacle towards controlling complex quantum systems, particularly quantum computers. Information is collected and processed by “observers”: all life forms and their artificial (computerized) extensions. The question that reflects the millennia-long controversy on free will is: do observers have the freedom to choose the mode of their observation? The appendix to this chapechapter investigates the interference of two quantum systems as a function of their entanglement.