3. Realistically, in each single scattering the electron will couple to non-orthogonal states of the environment, thus experiencing only a partial suppression of interference.
The exploration, monitoring, measurement, and possible suppression of interferences are a hot topic.
Moreover, avoidance or suppression of interferences can be added to these systems.
This coherence length is reached after a microsecond of exposure to air, and suppression of interference on a length scale of 10-12cm is achieved already after a nanosecond.[6] One can thus argue that generically the states privileged by decoherence at the level of components of the quantum state are localised in position or both position and momentum, and therefore kinematically classical.
We shall make more precise what we mean by this in Section 1, which discusses the concept of suppression of interference and gives a simplified survey of the theory, emphasising features that will be relevant to the following discussion.
Tegmark 1993 (Table 2) quotes some admittedly uncertain estimates for the suppression of interference due to a putative quantum gravity, but they are quantitatively very close to the rate of destruction of interference due to the GRW collapse (at least outside of the microscopic domain).
First, because a suitable generalisation of decoherence theory to a full theory of quantum gravity should yield suppression of interference between different classical spacetimes (Giulini et al. 1996, Section 4.2).
The characteristic feature of the first (often called 'dynamical' or 'environmental' decoherence) is the study of concrete models of (spontaneous) interactions between a system and its environment that lead to suppression of interference effects.
The theory of decoherence is precisely the study of (spontaneous) interactions between a system and its environment that lead to such suppression of interference.
The study of 'dynamical' decoherence consists to a large extent in the exploration of concrete spontaneous interactions that lead to suppression of interference.
Some of these earlier examples of decoherence (e.g., suppression of interference between left-handed and right-handed states of a molecule) are mathematically more accessible than more recent ones.
