We challenge the standard picture of decohering Schrödinger cat states as an ensemble average obeying a Lindblad master equation, brought about locally from an irreversible interaction with an environment. We generate self-consistent collections of pure system states correlated with specific environmental records, corresponding to the function of the wave-particle correlator first introduced in Carmichael et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 (2000). In the spirit of Carmichael et al. in Coherent States: Past, Present and Future , World Scientific, 1994, we find that the complementary unravelings evince a pronounced disparity when the “position” and “momentum” of the damped cavity mode — an explicitly open quantum system — are measured. Intensity-field correlations may largely deviate from a monotonic decay, while Wigner functions of the cavity state display contrasting manifestations of quantum interference when conditioned on photon counts sampling a continuous photocurrent. In turn, the conditional photodetection events mark the contextual diffusion of both the net charge generated at the homodyne detector, and the electromagnetic field amplitude in the resonator.
Th. K. Mavrogordatos (Mon,) studied this question.