Quantum Telegraph Behavior Without Photons
Quantum Physics
2026-01-01 v2
Abstract
We show that a simple model of non-Hermitian noise gives rise to the telegraph switching behavior seen in experiments with single qubits, without any reference to the existence of photons as corpuscles. This lends support to a continuous collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics, but can also be viewed as a model of continuous detection of a steady-state process in the incoherent limit. We show explicitly that such a system obeys the Born rule for particle counting statistics, even though no particle behavior has been invoked at any point in the calculation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.20837,
title = {Quantum Telegraph Behavior Without Photons},
author = {Truong-Son P. Van and Daniel Maienshein and David W. Snoke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.20837},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Update Title and Abstract, 5 figures