Related papers: Protective Measurements and the Reality of the Wav…
Post-inflationary boundary conditions are essential to the existence of our highly structured universe, and these can only come about through quantum mechanical state reductions - i.e., through measurements. The choice is between: An…
We generalize protective measurement for protective joint measurement of several observables. The merit of joint protective measurement is the determination of the eigenstates of an unknown Hamiltonian rather than the determination of…
Several new physics experiments in 1998 were performed and analyzed to show the subtlety of quantum theory, including the "wave-particle duality" and the non-separability of two-particle entangled state. Here it is shown that the…
A century on from the development of quantum theory, the interpretation of a quantum state is still discussed. If a physicist claims to have produced a system with a particular wave function, does this represent directly a physical wave of…
The measurement postulate of quantum theory stands in conflict with the laws of thermodynamics and has evoked debate regarding what actually constitutes a measurement. With the help of modern quantum statistical mechanics, we take the first…
The ability to measure every quantum observable is ensured by a fundamental result in quantum measurement theory. Nevertheless, additive conservation laws associated with physical symmetries, such as the angular momentum conservation, may…
Conventionally, unknown quantum states are characterized using quantum-state tomography based on strong or weak measurements carried out on an ensemble of identically prepared systems. By contrast, the use of protective measurements offers…
In this paper I review three different positions on the wave function, namely: nomological realism, dispositionalism, and configuration space realism by regarding as essential their capacity to account for the world of our experience. I…
In the quantum regime, the third law of thermodynamics implies the unattainability of pure states. As shown recently, such unattainability implies that a unitary interaction between the measured system and a measuring apparatus can never…
Conservation principles are essential to describe and quantify dynamical processes in all areas of physics. Classically, a conservation law holds because the description of reality can be considered independent of an observation…
The conceptual problems in quantum mechanics -- related to the collapse of the wave function, the particle-wave duality, the meaning of measurement -- arise from the need to ascribe particle character to the wave function. As will be shown,…
In quantum mechanics, the wavefunction predicts probabilities of possible measurement outcomes, but not which individual outcome is realised in each run of an experiment. This suggests that it describes an ensemble of states with different…
Weak measurements can be seen as an attempt at answering the 'Which way?' question without destroying interference between the pathways involved. Unusual mean values obtained in such measurements represent the response of a quantum system…
Constructing an ontology for quantum theory is challenging, in part due to unavoidable measurement back-action. The Aharonov-Albert-Vaidman weak measurement formalism provides a method to predict measurement results (weak values) in a…
Thermodynamically consistent measurements can either preserve statistics (unbiased) or preserve marginal states (non-invasive) but not both. Here we show the existence of metrological tasks which unequally favor each of the aforementioned…
Two of the most common interpretations of quantum measurement disagree about the fate of quantum amplitudes after measurement, yet this disagreement has not previously led to experimentally distinguishable predictions. In the standard…
Using the kinematic constraints of classical bodies we construct the allowable wavefunctions corresponding to classical solids. These are shown to be long lived metastable states that are qualitatively far from eigenstates of the true…
In the well known Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, advocated by N. Bohr, the physical objects and the experimental results can be described only in a macroscopic language, leaving any possible microscopic description as…
A recent result about measurability of a quantum state of a single quantum system is generalized to the case of a single pre- and post-selected quantum system described by a two-state vector. The protection required for such measurement is…
In this second paper, we develop the full mathematical structure of the algebra of the pseudo-observables, in order to solve the quantum measurement problem. Quantum state vectors are recovered but as auxiliary pseudo-observables storing…