Asymptotic dynamics of the alternate degrees of freedom

What is it about?

Accessing certain degrees of freedom of a composite system is much easier than for some other degrees of freedom. E.g. the Moon's center of mass and spatial orientation is directly accessible, quite in contrast with the Moon's constituent particles. This well known fact is often described as: interaction with environment (decoherence) makes a choice of the preferred system's degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, proving this plausible claim for an elaborated model is not so easy.

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Why is it important?

The pair of quantum optical modes independently interacting with the environment clearly justifies the wisdom that the environment is responsible for existence of the preferred (directly accessible in a lab) degrees of freedom of a composite system. The result refers to virtually all 'linear' models of open systems.