Coherence Cycle

A coherence cycle is the phase of evolution during which a cohesive informational region explores all internally coherent transformations before committing a globally coherent update.

During a coherence cycle:

multiple provisional branches evolve simultaneously
substrate-level non-local coherence governs their relationships
interference patterns arise through branch interactions
no epoch commit occurs yet
the system behaves like a quantum superposition
all evolution remains deterministic at the substrate level

A coherence cycle ends when global coherence constraints force an epoch commit, producing one or more child epochs in the branching epoch tree.

Coherence cycles are fundamental to quantum behaviour in IST and underpin superposition, interference, and entanglement.