Related papers: Uncollapsing the wavefunction
The postulate of the collapse of the wave function stands between the microscopic, quantum world, and the macroscopic world. Because of this intermediate position, the collapse process cannot be examined with the formalism of the quantum…
Irreversibility is often considered to characterize measurements in quantum mechanics. Fundamental problems with this characterization are addressed. First, whether a measurement is made in quantum mechanics is an arbitrary decision on the…
The problem of measurement in quantum mechanics is that the quantum particle in the course of evolution, as described by the linear Schrodinger equation, exists in all of its possible states, but in measuring, the particle is always…
The quantum measurement problem may have a resolution in de Broglie-Bohm theory in which measurements lead to dynamical wavefunction collapse. We study the collapse in a simple setup and find that there may be slight differences between…
We examine the entanglement and state disturbance arising in a protective measurement and argue that these inescapable effects doom the claim that protective measurement establishes the reality of the wave function. An additional challenge…
It is shown that the classical book by von Neumann proposing dynamics of measured systems with "reduction (or collapse) of system's wave packet" contains also hints how to avoid this discontinuity in time evolution of the measured system…
There are reasons to doubt that making sense of the wave function (other than as a probability algorithm) will help with the project of making sense of quantum mechanics. The consistency of the quantum-mechanical correlation laws with the…
One of the main postulates of quantum mechanics is that measurements destroy quantum coherence (wave function collapse). Recently it was discovered that in a many-body system dilute local measurements still preserve some coherence across…
We consider a continuous measurement of a two-level system (double-dot) by weakly coupled detector (tunnel point contact nearby). While usual treatment leads to the gradual system decoherence due to the measurement, we show that the…
After a brief introduction to the fermionic projector approach, we review how entanglement and second quantized bosonic and fermionic fields can be described in this framework. The constructions are discussed with regard to decoherence…
The 'collapse' of the wave function in a general measuring process is analyzed by a pure quantum mechanical (QM) approach. The problem of the delayed choice and Welcher-Weg (WW) experiments is analyzed for Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer.…
Wavefunction collapse is a puzzling aspect of quantum mechanics. Designing a test to confirm the instantaneousness of collapse has turned out to be challenging, especially for collapse in configuration space. We propose a test using two…
The possibility to test quantum measurement theories is discussed in the more phenomenological framework of the quantum nondemolition theory. A simple test of the hypothesis of the state vector collapse is proposed by looking for deviations…
I argue that there is a straightforward way to understand the occurrence of wavefunction collapses or 'quantum events' in relational approaches to quantum mechanics: we necessarily encounter a discontinuity in our description when a system…
Measurement in quantum mechanics is generally described as an irreversible process that perturbs the wavefunction describing a quantum system. In this work we establish a formal connection between the measurement description within the…
An experiment that would measure non--commuting quantum mechanical observables without collapsing the wave function has been recently proposed by Y Aharonov and J Anandan. These authors argue that this "protected measurement" may give…
Some of the problems connected with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are enumerated, in particular those related to some well known paradoxes and, above all, to the measurement process. We then show how the so called "Physics…
This paper presents an observational analysis of the Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser experiment through the framework of quantum mechanics. The Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser, a variation of the classic double-slit experiment, demonstrates the…
It is shown that no-collapse and collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics give equal object states (which predict everything that is observable) if one bases the relevant relations on the Von Neumann-L\"uders 'projection'. This…
Could we hear the pop of a wave-function collapse, and if so, what would it sound like? There exist reconstructions or modifications of quantum mechanics (collapse models) where this archetypal signature of randomness exists and can in…