Related papers: A Flea on Schroedinger's Cat
Although quantum mechanics is a mature theory, fundamental problems discussed during its time of foundation have remained with us to this day. These problems are centered on the problematic relation between the quantum and classical worlds.…
We introduce the concept of a "classical observable" as an operator with vanishingly small quantum fluctuations on a set of density matrices. It is shown how to construct them for a time evolved pure state. The study of classical…
The measurement problem in quantum mechanics originates in the inability of the Schr\"odinger equation to predict definite outcomes of measurements. This is due to the lack of objectivity of the eigenstates of the measuring apparatus. Such…
This paper reviews and suggests a resolution of the problem of definite outcomes of measurement. This problem, also known as "Schrodinger's cat," has long posed an apparent paradox because the state resulting from a measurement appears to…
In this presentation, I argue that weak measurements empirically support the notion of quantum superpositions as statistical alternatives. In short, weak measurements show that Schroedinger's cat is already dead or alive before the…
Left on its own, a quantum state evolves deterministically under the Schr\"odinger Equation, forming superpositions. Upon measurement, however, a stochastic process governed by the Born rule collapses it to a single outcome. This dual…
The quantum state of Schroedinger's cat is usually incorrectly described as a superposition of "dead" and "alive," despite an argument by Rinner and Werner that, locally, the cat should be considered to be in a mixture of non-superposed…
The transition from quantum to classical, in the case of a quantum harmonic oscillator, is typically identified with the transition from a quantum superposition of macroscopically distinguishable states, such as the Schr\"odinger cat state,…
The iconic Schr\"odinger's cat state describes a system that may be in a superposition of two macroscopically distinct states, for example two clearly separated oscillator coherent states. Quite apart from their role in understanding the…
A long-standing quantum-mechanical puzzle is whether the collapse of the wave function is a real physical process or simply an epiphenomenon. This puzzle lies at the heart of the measurement problem. One way to choose between the…
A misunderstanding of entangled states has spawned decades of concern about quantum measurements and a plethora of quantum interpretations. The "measurement state" or "Schrodinger's cat state" of a superposed quantum system and its detector…
The entangled Schrodinger cat state obtained immediately upon measurement of a superposed two-state quantum system is often considered paradoxical because it appears to predict two macroscopically different outcomes, such as an alive and…
We demonstrate the possibility of controlling the border between the quantum and the classical world by performing nonselective measurements on quantum systems. We consider a quantum harmonic oscillator initially prepared in a Schroedinger…
The linearity of quantum mechanics leads, under the assumption that the wave function offers a complete description of reality, to grotesque situations famously known as Schroedinger's cat. Ways out are either adding elements of reality or…
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…
Developing an earlier proposal (Ne'eman, Damnjanovic, etc), we show herein that there is a Landau continuous phase transition from the exact quantum dynamics to the effectively classical one, occurring via spontaneous superposition breaking…
This work will incorporate a few related tools for addressing the conceptual difficulties arising from sewing together classical and quantum mechanics: deterministic operators, weak measurements and post-selection. Weak Measurement, based…
A geometric approach to quantum mechanics with unitary evolution and non-unitary collapse processes is developed. In this approach the Schrodinger evolution of a quantum system is a geodesic motion on the space of states of the system…
Quantum measurement is commonly posed as a dynamical tension between linear Schr\"odinger evolution and an ad hoc collapse rule. I argue that the deeper conflict is logical: quantum theory is inherently contextual, whereas the classical…
We present a set of exact system solutions to a model we developed to study wave function collapse in the quantum spin measurement process. Specifically, we calculated the wave function evolution for a simple harmonic oscillator of spin…