Jump Time and Passage Time: The Duration of a Quantum Transition

Schulman, L. S.

doi:10.1007/3-540-45846-8_4

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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Section: Quantum Mechanicssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…I also show the early-time quantum Zeno effect, manifested as initial non-exponential decay. The time interval during which this is significant matches well to the "Zeno time" that I proposed in [7][8][9]. We next suppose that the decaying atom is one of many, all of which have essentially the same matrix elements for decay with photon emission.…”

Section: Quantum Mechanicssupporting

confidence: 63%

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Experimental Test of the “Special State” Theory of Quantum Measurement

Schulman

2012

Entropy

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An experimental test of the "special state" theory of quantum measurement is proposed. It should be feasible with present-day laboratory equipment and involves a slightly elaborated Stern-Gerlach setup. The "special state" theory is conservative with respect to quantum mechanics, but radical with respect to statistical mechanics, in particular regarding the arrow of time. In this article background material is given on both quantum measurement and statistical mechanics aspects. For example, it is shown that future boundary conditions would not contradict experience, indicating that the fundamental equal-a-priori-probability assumption at the foundations of statistical mechanics is far too strong (since future conditioning reduces the class of allowed states). The test is based on a feature of this theory that was found necessary in order to recover standard (Born) probabilities in quantum measurements. Specifically, certain systems should have "noise" whose amplitude follows the long-tailed Cauchy distribution. This distribution is marked by the occasional occurrence of extremely large signals as well as a non-self-averaging property. The proposed test is a variant of the Stern-Gerlach experiment in which protocols are devised, some of which will require the presence of this noise, some of which will not. The likely observational schemes would involve the distinction between detection and non-detection of that "noise". The signal to be detected (or not) would be either single photons or electric fields (and related excitations) in the neighborhood of the ends of the magnets.

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Section: Quantum Mechanicssupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Quantum Mechanicssupporting

confidence: 63%

Experimental Test of the “Special State” Theory of Quantum Measurement

Schulman

2012

Entropy

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“…For instance, if we take δE ≈ ǫ r m x c 2 , where ǫ r ≡ δm x /m x = 0.3 · 10 −6 is the relative standard deviation at the measurement of the electron and proton mass, then δt ∼ 1.6 · 10 6 δt 0 . In the case of the electron, δt 0 = ℓ/c ∼ 10 −21 s is comparable to the estimates of the "jump time" τ J ∼ 10 −20 s for atomic transitions [13]. These change however the electron wave function over a distance larger than 10 3 ℓ, so that δt could be a reasonable upper limit for τ J .…”

Section: The Relativistic Schrödinger Equationsupporting

confidence: 72%

Classical probability waves

Grigorescu¹

2008

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications

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Probability waves in the configuration space are associated with coherent solutions of the classical Liouville or Fokker-Planck equations. Distributions localized in the momentum space provide action waves, specified by the probability density and the generating function of the Hamilton-Jacobi theory. It is shown that by introducing a minimum distance in the coordinate space, the action distributions aquire the energy dispersion specific to the quantum objects. At finite temperature, probability density waves propagating with the sound velocity are obtained as nonstationary solutions of the classical Fokker-Planck equation. The results suggest that in a system of quantum Brownian particles, a transition from complex to real probability waves could be observed.Comment: 15 pages, added Appendix

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“…The experiments mentioned did not seem practical. Another possibility came up in dealing with the time it took for a quantum system to change states [27], but there too it was not clear (to me at least) how practical this proposal would be.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Program for the Special State Theory of Quantum Measurement

Schulman

2017

Entropy

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Establishing (or falsifying) the special state theory of quantum measurement is a program with both theoretical and experimental directions. The special state theory has only pure unitary time evolution, like the many worlds interpretation, but only has one world. How this can be accomplished requires both "special states" and significant modification of the usual assumptions about the arrow of time. All this is reviewed below. Experimentally, proposals for tests already exist and the problems are first the practical one of doing the experiment and second the suggesting of other experiments. On the theoretical level, many problems remain and among them are the impact of particle statistics on the availability of special states, finding a way to estimate their abundance and the possibility of using a computer for this purpose. Regarding the arrow of time, there is an early proposal of J. A. Wheeler that may be implementable with implications for cosmology.

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Jump Time and Passage Time: The Duration of a Quantum Transition

Cited by 12 publications

References 39 publications

Experimental Test of the “Special State” Theory of Quantum Measurement

Experimental Test of the “Special State” Theory of Quantum Measurement

Classical probability waves

Program for the Special State Theory of Quantum Measurement

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