“The physics community is mostly divided into two groups,” Johannes Kofler tells PhysOrg.com. “One group believes that quantum theory is underlying the classical world, and that classical physics comes from the quantum. The other group thinks that quantum physics has to be altered. It forbids that quantum mechanics works on a macro level in the classical world by postulating additional laws.”

Our motivation is to understand how the classical world comes out of quantum physics,” Kofler says. “The established approach in research is decoherence where one has to take into account the complexity of systems and interactions with environment.” It is interaction with the environment that brings decoherence into play, destroying quantum coherences and making it impossible to observe quantum phenomena. “We believe we found a process complementary to decoherence which can explain the quantum-to-classical transition.”