

Developing theory of decoherence and elucidating its significance for the quantum–to–classical transition is Zurek’s major contribution to physics. Zurek also demonstrated (with Wootters) that an unknown quantum cannot be cloned. This is a fundamental result, and an essential distinction between classical and quantum information. Furthermore, Zurek has vastly extended Kibble’s cosmological scenario to develop a successful general theory of phase transition dynamics (“Kibble-Zurek mechanism”) that has been verified experimentally in superconductors and superfluids (including BEC’s).
