Repeated measurements on one part of a bipartite system strongly affect the other part that is not measured, the dynamics of which is regulated by an effective contracted evolution operator. When the spectrum of this operator is discrete, the nonmeasured system is driven into a pure state, irrespective of the initial state, provided that the spectrum satisfies certain conditions. We show here that, even in the case of continuous spectrum, an effective distillation can occur under rather general conditions. We confirm it by applying our formalism to a simple model.
Repeated observations of a quantum system interacting with another one can drive the latter toward a particular quantum state, irrespective of its initial condition, because of an effective nonunitary evolution. If the target state is a pure one, the degree of purity of the system approaches unity, even when the initial condition of the system is a mixed state. In this paper we study the behavior of the purity from the initial value to the final one, that is, unity. Depending on the parameters, after a finite number of measurements, the purity exhibits oscillations that brings about a lower purity than that of the initial state, which is a point to be taken care of in concrete applications.
In this paper measurement is defined via an observation operator with simple, purely discrete spectrum. When the quantum Zeno effect holds, a continuously measured quantum process with fixed initial state ‘‘freezes’’ in that state. Such states are called ‘‘regular’’ states. If the final state is also fixed, then movement from the initial state to the final state is forced to occur, whether or not the initial state is regular. This forced movement is studied here in the context of a discrete state model which contains a distinguished nonregular state which mediates all transitions. In this model the forced movement between any two states satisfies a ‘‘least action’’ principle, wherein action is identified with change of state transitions. For completeness, the model is also studied when only the initial state is fixed under continuous measurement. In that case the distinguished state exhibits exact exponential decay at all times. The model is of interest independently of issues related to continuous measurement inasmuch as it is a ‘‘discrete’’ approximation to a ‘‘continuous’’ decay model. More precisely, the distinguished state exhibits exact exponential decay on a finite time interval which expands without bound as the discrete decay products densely approach the continuum. This unexpected result provides a striking confirmation of Fermi’s ‘‘golden rule.’’
When you measure an observable,
A, in quantum mechanics, the state of the system changes. This, in turn, affects the quantum-mechanical uncertainty in some noncommuting observable,
B. The standard uncertainty relation puts a lower bound on the uncertainty of
B in the initial state. What is relevant for a subsequent measurement of
B, however, is the uncertainty of
B in the postmeasurement state. We re-examine this problem, both in the case where
A has a pure point spectrum and in the case where
A has a continuous spectrum. In the latter case, the need to include a finite detector resolution, as part of what it means to measure such an observable, has dramatic implications for the result of successive measurements. Ozawa, [Phys. Rev. A 67, 042105 (2003)] proposed an inequality satisfied in the case of successive measurements. Among our results, we show that his inequality is ineffective (can never come close to being saturated). For the cases of interest, we compute a sharper lower bound.
We revisit aspects of monitoring observables with continuous spectrum in a quantum system subject to dissipative (Lindbladian) or conservative (Hamiltonian) evolutions. After recalling some of the salient features of the case of pure monitoring, we deal with the case when monitoring is in competition with a Lindbladian evolution. We show that the strong measurement limit leads to a diffusion on the spectrum of the observable. For the case with competition between observation and Hamiltonian dynamics, we exhibit a scaling limit in which the crossover between the classical regime and a diffusive regime can be analyzed in details.
Abstract What happens when a quantum system undergoing unitary evolution in time is subject to repeated projective measurements to the initial state at random times? A question of general interest is: how does the survival probability S m , namely, the probability that an initial state survives even after m number of measurements, behave as a function of m ? We address these issues in the context of two paradigmatic quantum systems, one, the quantum random walk evolving in discrete time, and the other, the tight-binding model evolving in continuous time, with both defined on a one-dimensional periodic lattice with a finite number of sites N . For these two models, we present several numerical and analytical results that hint at the curious nature of quantum measurement dynamics. In particular, we unveil that when evolution after every projective measurement continues with the projected component of the instantaneous state, the average and the typical survival probability decay as an exponential in m for large m . By contrast, if the evolution continues with the leftover component, namely, what remains of the instantaneous state after a measurement has been performed, the survival probability exhibits two characteristic m values, namely, m 1 ⋆ ( N ) ∼ N and m 2 ⋆ ( N ) ∼ N δ with δ > 1. These scales are such that (i) for m large and satisfying m < m 1 ⋆ ( N ) , the decay of the survival probability is as m −2 , (ii) for m satisfying m 1 ⋆ ( N ) ≪ m < m 2 ⋆ ( N ) , the decay is as m −3/2 , while (iii) for m ≫ m 2 ⋆ ( N ) , the decay is as an exponential. The results for the dynamics with the leftover component, already known for the case of measurements at regular intervals, are being extended here to the case of measurements at random intervals. We find that our results hold independently of the choice of the distribution of times between successive measurements, as have been corroborated by our resu