Abstract
Hartle’s generalized quantum mechanics formalism is used to examine spacetime coarse grainings, i.e., sets of alternatives defined with respect to a region extended in time as well as space, in the quantum mechanics of a free relativistic particle. For a simple coarse graining and suitable initial conditions, tractable formulas are found for branch wave functions. Despite the nonlocality of the positive-definite version of the Klein-Gordon inner product, which means that nonoverlapping branches are not sufficient to imply decoherence, some initial conditions are found to give decoherence and allow the consistent assignment of probabilities.
- Received 9 June 1994
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.50.6344
©1994 American Physical Society