Related papers: Looking for Work in Quantum Thermodynamics
A scheme for constructing quantum mechanics is given that does not have Hilbert space and linear operators as its basic elements. Instead, a version of algebraic approach is considered. Elements of a noncommutative algebra (observables) and…
We present a discussion of the fundamental loss of unitarity that appears in quantum mechanics due to the use of a physical apparatus to measure time. This induces a decoherence effect that is independent of any interaction with the…
Quantum annealing is a generic solver of classical optimization problems that makes full use of quantum fluctuations. We consider work statistics given by a repetition of quantum annealing processes by employing the Jarzynski equality…
The development of last years in quantum geometrodynamics highlights new problems which were not obvious in its first formulation proposed by Wheeler and DeWitt. At the first stage the main task was to apply known quantization schemes to…
In the classical world one can construct two identical systems which have identical behavior and give identical measurement results. We show this to be impossible in the quantum domain. We prove that after the same quantum measurement two…
Standard quantum mechanics undeniably violates the notion of separability that classical physics accustomed us to consider as valid. By relating the phenomenon of quantum nonseparability to the all-important concept of potentiality, we…
Quantum decoherence refers to the phenomenon when the interaction of a quantum system with its environment results in the degradation of quantum coherence. Decoherence is considered to be the most popular mechanism responsible for the…
The quantum measurement problem as was formulated by von Neumann in 1933 can be solved by going beyond the operational quantum formalism. In our "prequantum model" quantum systems are symbolic representations of classical random fields. The…
Familiar textbook quantum mechanics assumes a fixed background spacetime to define states on spacelike surfaces and their unitary evolution between them. Quantum theory has changed as our conceptions of space and time have evolved. But…
In quantum cosmology, one applies quantum physics to the whole universe. While no unique version and no completely well-defined theory is available yet, the framework gives rise to interesting conceptual, mathematical and physical…
Quantum mechanics under the Copenhagen interpretation is one of the most experimentally well verified formalisms. However, it is known that the interpretation makes explicit reference to external observation or "measurement." One says that…
The aim of this work is to show how Einstein's quantum hypothesis leads immediately and necessarily to a departure from classical mechanics. First we note that the classical description and predictions are in terms of idealized measurements…
In this work, we show that very natural, apparently simple problems in quantum measurement theory can be undecidable even if their classical analogues are decidable. Undecidability hence appears as a genuine quantum property here. Formally,…
We suggest a somewhat non-standard view on a set of curious, paradoxical from the standpoint of simple classical physics and everyday experience phenomena. There are the quantisation (discrete set of values) of the observables (e.g.,…
In open quantum systems, a clear distinction between work and heat is often challenging, and extending the quantum Jarzynski equality to systems evolving under general quantum channels beyond unitality remains an open problem in quantum…
Recently a study of the first superposed mechanical quantum object ("machine") visible to the naked eye was published. However, as we show, it turns out that if the object would actually be observed, i.e. would interact with an optical…
In this work we investigate the relation between quantum measurements and decoherence, in order to formally express the necessity of the latter for obtaining an informative output from the former. To this aim, referring to the Von Neumann…
A key problem in the attempt to quantize the gravitational field is the choice of boundary conditions. These are mixed, in that spatial and normal components of metric perturbations obey different sets of boundary conditions. In the…
The phenomenon of universality is one of the most striking in many-body physics. Despite having sometimes wildly different microscopic constituents, systems can nonetheless behave in precisely the same way, with only the variable names…
A recent concept in theoretical physics, motivated in string duality and M-theory, is the notion that not all quantum theories arise from quantising a classical system. Also, a given quantum model may possess more than just one classical…