Related papers: Ideal clocks - a convenient fiction
Time measured by an ideal clock crucially depends on the gravitational potential and velocity of the clock according to general relativity. Technological advances in manufacturing high-precision atomic clocks have rapidly improved their…
A practical way to deal with the problem of time in quantum cosmology and quantum gravity is proposed. The main tool is effective equations, which mainly restrict explicit considerations to semiclassical regimes but have the crucial…
We present a simple argument leading to a fundamental minimum uncertainty in the determination of times. It only relies in the uncertainty principle and time dilation in a gravitational field. It implies any attempt to measure times will…
Atomic frequency standards have achieved steadily increasing precision over the past seventy years, enabled in part by feedback mechanisms that stabilise their output. In parallel, the timekeeping capabilities of quantum systems have been…
The Conditional Probability Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics replaces the abstract notion of time used in standard Quantum Mechanics by the time that can be read off from a physical clock. The use of physical clocks leads to apparent…
Using the influence functional formalism, the problem of an accelerating detector in the presence of a scalar field in its ground state is considered in Minkowski space. As is known since the work of Unruh, to a quantum mechanical detector…
Stochastic systems consisting of a very large number of independent elementary processes of the same kind, especially the radioactive decay, are considered as quantum clocks. By adapting the framework of the previously introduced concept of…
The perspective is advanced that the time parameter in quantum mechanics corresponds to the time coordinate in a Minkowski flat spacetime local approximation to the actual dynamical curved spacetime of General Relativity, rather than to an…
While Einstein clocks synchronization process is performed, one has a well defined region in which the clocks are synchronized and another one in which the clocks are not yet synchronized. The frontier between them evolves differently from…
We calculate the trajectories which maximize the Unruh effect, mode by mode, when given a fixed energy budget for acceleration. We find that Unruh processes are most likely to occur, and therefore potentially best observable, for certain…
A commonly adopted relational account of time evolution in generally-covariant systems, and more specifically in quantum cosmology, is argued to be unsatisfactory, insofar as it describes evolution relative to observed readings of a clock…
The problem of time operator in quantum mechanics is revisited. The unsharp measurement model for quantum time based on the dynamical system-clock interaction, is studied. Our analysis shows that the problem of the quantum time operator…
In a uniform gravitational field, classical test objects fall universally. Any reference object or observer will fall in the same universal manner. Therefore, a uniform gravitational field cannot create dynamics between observers and…
In quantum field theory, the vacuum is popularly considered to be a complex medium populated with virtual particle + antiparticle pairs. To an observer experiencing uniform acceleration, it is generally held that these virtual particles…
Quantum theory depends on an external classical time, and there ought to exist an equivalent reformulation of the theory which does not depend on such a time. The demand for the existence of such a reformulation suggests that quantum theory…
We analyze the nature and performance of clocks formed by stabilizing an oscillator to the phase difference between two paths of an atom interferometer. The phase evolution has been modeled as being driven by the proper-time difference…
Measurements on classical systems are usually idealized and assumed to have infinite precision. In practice, however, any measurement has a finite resolution. We investigate the theory of non-ideal measurements in classical mechanics using…
Quantum time dilation occurs when a clock moves in a superposition of relativistic momentum wave packets. We utilize the lifetime of an excited hydrogen-like atom as a clock to demonstrate how quantum time dilation manifests in a…
We discuss the corrections to the orbital period of a particle in a constant magnetic field, driven by the model of noncommutative geometry recently associated to a quantum clock. The effects are extremely small, but in principle…
It is shown that the attempt to extend the notion of ideal measurement to quantum field theory leads to a conflict with locality, because (for most observables) the state vector reduction associated with an ideal measurement acts to…