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Arrow of Time for Continuous Quantum Measurement

Quantum Physics 2017-12-06 v1

Abstract

We investigate the statistical arrow of time for a quantum system being monitored by a sequence of measurements. For a continuous qubit measurement example, we demonstrate that time-reversed evolution is always physically possible, provided that the measurement record is also negated. Despite this restoration of dynamical reversibility, a statistical arrow of time emerges, and may be quantified by the log-likelihood difference between forward and backward propagation hypotheses. We then show that such reversibility is a universal feature of non-projective measurements, with forward or backward Janus measurement sequences that are time-reversed inverses of each other.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.03818,
  title  = {Arrow of Time for Continuous Quantum Measurement},
  author = {Justin Dressel and Areeya Chantasri and Andrew N. Jordan and Alexander N. Korotkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.03818},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures, including supplement

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:19:03.376Z