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Progress Article

Nature Physics 5, 181–188 (1 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/nphys1202

Quantum Darwinism

Wojciech Hubert Zurek

Quantum Darwinism describes the proliferation, in the environment, of multiple records of selected states of a quantum system. It explains how the quantum fragility of a state of a single quantum system can lead to the classical robustness of states in their correlated multitude; shows how effective |[lsquo]|wave-packet collapse|[rsquo]| arises as a result of the proliferation throughout the environment of imprints of the state of the system; and provides a framework for the derivation of Born|[rsquo]|s rule, which relates the probabilities of detecting states to their amplitudes. Taken together, these three advances mark considerable progress towards settling the quantum measurement problem.