Time-of-Arrival States
Quantum Physics
2009-10-31 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
Although one can show formally that a time-of-arrival operator cannot exist, one can modify the low momentum behaviour of the operator slightly so that it is self-adjoint. We show that such a modification results in the difficulty that the eigenstates are drastically altered. In an eigenstate of the modified time-of-arrival operator, the particle, at the predicted time-of-arrival, is found far away from the point of arrival with probability 1/2.
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/9807043,
title = {Time-of-Arrival States},
author = {J. Oppenheim and B. Reznik and W. G. Unruh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/9807043},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
15 pages, 2 figures