The classical limit of quantum mechanics through coarse-grained measurements

Abstract

Understanding how classical physics emerges from quantum mechanics remains a central problem in the foundations of physics. Here we derive a classical limit from finite-resolution measurements, modeled by continuous coarse-grained POVMs. When the resolved phase-space area is large compared with Planck's constant, the accessible statistics of any quantum state admit an effective classical description: coarse-grained observables become approximately jointly measurable and the induced probability density is positive. We derive the exact evolution equation for this density and show that, in the strong coarse-graining regime, its non-Liouville corrections are suppressed up to an Ehrenfest time, resulting in classical Hamiltonian flow generated by a Hamiltonian smoothed over the measurement cell. When the Hamiltonian varies negligibly across such a cell, the smoothed Hamiltonian reduces to the classical Hamiltonian whose quantization produced the quantum dynamics, thereby closing the quantization--classical-limit loop. Repeated finite-resolution measurements then generate stochastic records confined, with high probability, to tubes around classical trajectories. Our results provide a unified operational framework for the quantum-to-classical transition in microscopic and macroscopic systems, and establish the consistency of the quantization--classical-limit cycle.