“…While decoherence theory is of enormous practical importance for estimating the effective lifetimes of manipulable quantum states, standard models of decoherence and methods for calculating decoherence times remain semi-classical (for reviews, see [1,2,3]). The physical mechanism of decoherence likewise remains controversial, with the environment functioning as an information sink in some formulations [4,5,6,7] and as an information channel in others [8,9,10,11]. Hence while the timecourse of decoherence can be observed experimentally [12,13,14], the underlying information dynamics are not yet fully characterized.…”