The quantum measurement problem is one of the most fascinating and challenging topics in physics both theoretically and experimentally. It involves deep questions and the use of very sophisticated and elegant techniques. After analyzing the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and of the Copenhagen interpretation, this book reviews the most important approaches to the measurement problem and rigorously reformulates the "collapse of the wave function" by measurement, as a dephasing process quantitatively characterized by an order parameter (called the decoherence parameter), according to the many-Hilbert-space approach to the problem.The book deals not only with the measurement processes (including imperfect measurements) but also with related interference and mesoscopic phenomena - by means of general arguments - of solvable models and of numerical simulations. The quantum Zeno effect and the issue of irreversibility are also discussed.

This is a textbook on stochastic quantization which was originally proposed by G. Parisi and Y. S. Wu in 1981 and then developed by many workers. I assume that the reader has finished a standard course in quantum field theory. The Parisi-Wu stochastic quantization method gives quantum mechanics as the thermal-equilibrium limit of a hypothetical stochastic process with respect to some fictitious time other than ordinary time. We can consider this to be a third method of quantization; remarkably different from the conventional theories, i. e, the canonical and path-integral ones. Over the past ten years, we have seen the technical merits of this method in quantizing gauge fields and in performing large numerical simulations, which have never been obtained by the other methods. I believe that the stochastic quantization method has the potential to extend the territory of quantum mechanics and of quantum field theory. However, I should remark that stochastic quantization is still under development through many mathematical improvements and physical applications, and also that the fictitious time of the theory is only a mathematical tool, for which we do not yet know its origin in the physical background. For these reasons, in this book, I attempt to describe its theoretical formulation in detail as well as practical achievements.