English

Quantum measurements of time

Quantum Physics 2020-03-19 v3 Quantum Gases Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We propose a time-of-arrival operator in quantum mechanics by conditioning on a quantum clock. This allows us to bypass some of the problems of previous proposals, and to obtain a Hermitian time of arrival operator whose probability distribution arises from the Born rule and which has a clear physical interpretation. The same procedure can be employed to measure the "time at which some event happens" for arbitrary events (and not just specifically for the arrival time of a particle).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.12869,
  title  = {Quantum measurements of time},
  author = {Lorenzo Maccone and Krzysztof Sacha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.12869},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

4 pages+appendices (=supplemental material). Version accepted for publication on Phys. Rev. Lett

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:58:01.759Z