12,016 research outputs found
A Transactional Analysis of Interaction Free Measurements
The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics is applied to the
"interaction-free" measurement scenario of Elitzur and Vaidman and to the
Quantum Zeno Effect version of the measurement scenario by Kwiat, et al. It is
shown that the non-classical information provided by the measurement scheme is
supplied by the probing of the intervening object by incomplete offer and
confirmation waves that do not form complete transactions or lead to real
interactions.Comment: Accepted for publication in Foundations of Physics Letter
Quantifying Absorption in the Transactional Interpretation
The Transactional Interpretation offers a solution to the measurement problem
by identifying specific physical conditions precipitating the non-unitary
`measurement transition' of von Neumann. Specifically, the transition occurs as
a result of absorber response (a process lacking in the standard approach to
the theory). The purpose of this Letter is to make clear that, despite recent
claims to the contrary, the concepts of `absorber' and `absorber response,' as
well as the process of absorption, are physically and quantitatively
well-defined in the transactional picture. In addition, the Born Rule is
explicitly derived for radiative processes.Comment: Final version, accepted in International Journal of Quantum
Foundation
Entanglement area law from specific heat capacity
We study the scaling of entanglement in low-energy states of quantum
many-body models on lattices of arbitrary dimensions. We allow for unbounded
Hamiltonians such that systems with bosonic degrees of freedom are included. We
show that if at low enough temperatures the specific heat capacity of the model
decays exponentially with inverse temperature, the entanglement in every
low-energy state satisfies an area law (with a logarithmic correction). This
behaviour of the heat capacity is typically observed in gapped systems.
Assuming merely that the low-temperature specific heat decays polynomially with
temperature, we find a subvolume scaling of entanglement. Our results give
experimentally verifiable conditions for area laws, show that they are a
generic property of low-energy states of matter, and, to the best of our
knowledge, constitute the first proof of an area law for unbounded Hamiltonians
beyond those that are integrable.Comment: v3 now featuring bosonic system
Equivalence of Statistical Mechanical Ensembles for Non-Critical Quantum Systems
We consider the problem of whether the canonical and microcanonical ensembles
are locally equivalent for short-ranged quantum Hamiltonians of spins
arranged on a -dimensional lattices. For any temperature for which the
system has a finite correlation length, we prove that the canonical and
microcanonical state are approximately equal on regions containing up to
spins. The proof rests on a variant of the Berry--Esseen
theorem for quantum lattice systems and ideas from quantum information theory
Thermalization and Return to Equilibrium on Finite Quantum Lattice Systems
Thermal states are the bedrock of statistical physics. Nevertheless, when and
how they actually arise in closed quantum systems is not fully understood. We
consider this question for systems with local Hamiltonians on finite quantum
lattices. In a first step, we show that states with exponentially decaying
correlations equilibrate after a quantum quench. Then we show that the
equilibrium state is locally equivalent to a thermal state, provided that the
free energy of the equilibrium state is sufficiently small and the thermal
state has exponentially decaying correlations. As an application, we look at a
related important question: When are thermal states stable against noise? In
other words, if we locally disturb a closed quantum system in a thermal state,
will it return to thermal equilibrium? We rigorously show that this occurs when
the correlations in the thermal state are exponentially decaying. All our
results come with finite-size bounds, which are crucial for the growing field
of quantum thermodynamics and other physical applications.Comment: 8 pages (5 for main text and 3 for appendices); v2 is essentially the
published versio
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