Related papers: Are quantum states real?
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
While complex numbers are essential in mathematics, they are not needed to describe physical experiments, expressed in terms of probabilities, hence real numbers. Physics however aims to explain, rather than describe, experiments through…
The theorem of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph proves that different quantum states describe different physical realities. Their proof is based on the construction of entanglement measurement bases of two, and more than two qbits. In this note,…
At present, quantum theory leaves unsettled which quantities ontologically, physically exist in a quantum system. Do observables such as energy and position have meaningful values only at the precise moment of measurement, as in the…
Harrigan and Spekkens (2010) provided a categorization of quantum ontological models classifying them as $\psi$-ontic or $\psi$-epistemic if the quantum state describes respectively either a physical reality or mere observers' knowledge.…
Recently, it has been argued [arXiv:1111.6597, arXiv:1005.5173] that different quantum states do necessarily correspond to different elements of reality, under the assumption that quantum mechanics is correct and that measurement settings…
Certain concrete "ontological models" for quantum mechanics (models in which measurement outcomes are deterministic and quantum states are equivalent to classical probability distributions over some space of `hidden variables') are…
It is a fundamental prediction of quantum theory that states of physical systems are described by complex vectors or density operators on a Hilbert space. However, many experiments admit effective descriptions in terms of other state…
It has been experimentally demonstrated that quantum coherence can persist in macroscopic phenomena [J.R. Friedman et al.,Nature, 406 (2000) 43]. To face the challenge of this new fact, in this article QM in its standard form is assumed to…
The subject of this thesis are various properties of quantum states that make them "non-classical" and their behaviour under unitary operations. In chapter 2 some basic concepts of quantum mechanics and quantum information are reviewed. In…
New status in quantum mechanics is connected with recent achievements in the inverse problem. With its help instead of about ten exactly solvable models which serve as a basis of the contemporary education there are infinite (!) number,…
The quantum reality problem is that of finding a mathematically precise definition of a sample space of configurations of beables, events, histories, paths, or other mathematical objects, and a corresponding probability distribution, for…
It is a fundamental consequence of the superposition principle for quantum states that there must exist non-orthogonal states, that is states that, although different, have a non-zero overlap. This finite overlap means that there is no way…
The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…
This article presents a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. It extends the meaning of ``measurement'' to include all property-indicating facts. Intrinsically space is undifferentiated: there are no points on which a world of locally…
An investigation of Einstein's ``physical'' reality and the concept of quantum reality in terms of information theory suggests a solution to quantum paradoxes such as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) and the Schroedinger-cat paradoxes.…
We investigate the strengths and limitations of the Spekkens toy model, which is a local hidden variable model that replicates many important properties of quantum dynamics. First, we present a set of five axioms that fully encapsulate…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
It is shown that the nature of quantum states that emerge from decoherence is such that one can {\em measure} the expectation value of any observable of the system in a single measurement. This can be done even when such pointer states are…
Does the quantum state represent reality or our knowledge of reality? In making this distinction precise, we are led to a novel classification of hidden variable models of quantum theory. Indeed, representatives of each class can be found…