The quantum-to-classical transition is commonly described through decoherenceand environmental entanglement, yet quantitative measures of structured phaseorganisation within coherent quantum states remain comparatively underdeveloped.This work introduces a phase-organisation functional that measures the structuredphase separation encoded in the off-diagonal coherence channels of a quantumdensity matrix. The functional characterises the progressive conversion ofcoherent phase structure into environmentally encoded branch distinguishabilityduring open-system evolution. A minimal two-state model illustrates the evolution of phase organisation underdecoherence. Environmental degrees of freedom are modelled as distributedphase-encoding channels whose cumulative phase dispersion suppresses coherenceexponentially. An effective informational persistence quantity, termedinformational mass (Imass), is introduced operationally as a measure ofaccumulated environmental branch distinguishability. The framework connects phase accumulation, decoherence, entropy growth, andclassical distinguishability within a unified informational description whileremaining fully compatible with standard open quantum systems theory. Potentialapplications to coherence monitoring and hybrid quantum-classical architecturesare discussed. This is a working paper deposited to establish a citable DOI record.The framework is exploratory; limitations and open questions arediscussed explicitly in the paper.
David Wert (Wed,) studied this question.