English

Allowing Wigner's friend to sequentially measure incompatible observables

Quantum Physics 2023-05-17 v1

Abstract

The Wigner's friend thought experiment has gained a resurgence of interest in recent years thanks to no-go theorems that extend it to Bell-like scenarios. One of these, by us and co-workers, showcased the contradiction that arises between quantum theory and a set of assumptions, weaker than those in Bell's theorem, which we named "local friendliness". Using these assumptions it is possible to arrive at a set of inequalities for a given scenario, and, in general, some of these inequalities will be harder to violate than the Bell inequalities for the same scenario. A crucial feature of the extended Wigner's friend scenario in our aforementioned work was the ability of a superobserver to reverse the unitary evolution that gives rise to their friend's measurement. Here, we present a new scenario where the superobserver can interact with the friend repeatedly in a single experimental instance, either by asking them directly for their result, thus ending that instance, or by reversing their measurement and instructing them to perform a new one. We show that, in these scenarios, the local friendliness inequalities will always be the same as Bell inequalities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.09102,
  title  = {Allowing Wigner's friend to sequentially measure incompatible observables},
  author = {Aníbal Utreras-Alarcón and Eric G. Cavalcanti and Howard M. Wiseman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09102},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

12 pages, 3 figures. No observers were harmed in the conduct of this work