Decoherence and Phase Transitions in Quantum Dynamics

A particle with internal degrees of freedom is in contact with a bath of photons (necessitating a relativistic treatment). The occurrence of decoherence is established and the density matrix is found to be diagonal in momentum space. In the case of non-trivial internal degrees of freedom and selection rules there is a first order phase transition separating those degrees of freedom. Finally, because probability amplitudes become probabilities, Einstein’s proposal that more than one detector could respond to a signal is answered.