Towards a Better Understanding of Decoherence from a General Perspective

The present paper proposes an approach to quantum decoherence more general than the traditional environment-induced decoherence (EID) approach, formulated by Zurek and his collaborators. This new approach, developed in different publications of our group, adopts the closed-system perspective, i. e. considers the whole system (system plus environment), and is based on the temporal evolution of the expectation values of the closed system's observables. By unifying the environment-induced decoherence and some alternative proposals, this new approach would facilitate the elucidation of the concept of decoherence from a general perspective.