Related papers: Work drives time evolution
Phenomenological studies of quantum gravity have proposed a modification of the commutator between position and momentum in quantum mechanics so to introduce a minimal uncertainty in position in quantum mechanics. Such a minimal uncertainty…
Each scheme of state reconstruction comes down to parametrize the state of a quantum system by expectation values or probabilities directly measurable in an experiment. It is argued that the time evolution of these quantities provides an…
It is unclear whether an observable notion of time exists in quantum gravity even in principle because spacetime itself fluctuates. We propose a form of observable time in perturbative quantum gravity. First, we define an elapsed proper…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
The quantum mechanical time-evolution is studied for a particle under the influence of an explicitly time-dependent rotating potential. We discuss the existence of the propagator and we show that in the limit of rapid rotation it converges…
Spacetime manifolds that are not time orientable play a key role in a gravitational explanation of quantum theory. Such manifolds allow topology change, but also have fascinating additional properties such as net charge from source-free…
Quantum mechanics rests on the assumption that time is a classical variable. As such, classical time is assumed to be measurable with infinite accuracy. However, all real clocks are subject to quantum fluctuations, which leads to the…
Time in relativity theory has a status different from that adopted by standard quantum mechanics, where time is considered as a parameter measured with reference to an external absolute Newtonian frame. This status strongly restricts its…
Hamiltonian mechanics describes the evolution of a system through its Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian typically also represents the energy observable, a Noether-conserved quantity associated with the time-invariance of the law of evolution. In…
The failure of conventional quantum theory to recognize time as an observable and to admit time operators is addressed. Instead of focusing on the existence of a time operator for a given Hamiltonian, we emphasize the role of the…
According to standard quantum theory, the time evolution operator of a quantum system is independent of the state of the system. One can, however, consider systems in which this is not the case: the evolution operator may depend on the…
Constraints on work extraction are fundamental to our operational understanding of the thermodynamics of both classical and quantum systems. In the quantum setting, finite-time control operations typically generate coherence in the…
Quantum mechanics is derived as an application of the method of maximum entropy. No appeal is made to any underlying classical action principle whether deterministic or stochastic. Instead, the basic assumption is that in addition to the…
Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…
We propose a solution to the problem of time for systems with a single global Hamiltonian constraint. Our solution stems from the observation that, for these theories, conventional gauge theory methods fail to capture the full classical…
"\textit{The noise is the signal}"[R. Landauer, Nature \textbf{392}, 658 (1998)] emphasizes the rich information content encoded in fluctuations. This paper assesses the dynamical role of fluctuations of a quantum system driven far from…
Various approaches of defining and determining work performed on a quantum system are compared. Any operational definition of work, however, must allow for two facts, first, that work characterizes a process rather than an instantaneous…
A version of the quantum theory of gravity based on the concept of the wave functional of the universe is proposed. To determine the physical wave functional, the quantum principle of least action is formulated as a secular equation for the…
Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…