The problem of quantum state reduction in the process of measurement has attracted attention of almost everyone who created, developed or explained quantum physics to the students. Absence of a solution is the basis for the statement that the physical laws alone are not enough to describe the reduction of state of the measured particle. In the presented study, it is taken into account that the measurement of all properties of quantum particles can not be carried out in one physical process (the no-cloning theorem). For such a measurement several series of incompatible observations are needed, each series is to be carried out by means of a separate measuring instrument. Each event of measurement is a separate physical process; combination of different measurement events is performed by the Measurer - a subject capable of recognizing or not recognizing different events as similar depending on the purpose of the measurement, and capable as well of planning the measurements, of obtaining results and making conclusions. Several strategies for measuring the quantum state of photon polarization are considered; it is shown that modeling of a mixed state by a set of photon pure states is possible only if for this set in all the measurements the same measuring devices are used. It is also shown that the reduction of the quantum state is determined by the parameters of interaction of the measuring device with the measured particle. This fact removes the restrictions on the magnitudes of correlations of different observables, known as Bell's inequalities.
The problem of quantum state reduction in the process of measurement has attracted attention of almost everyone who created, developed or explained quantum physics to the students. Absence of a solution is the basis for the statement that the physical laws alone are not enough to describe the reduction of state of the measured particle. In the presented study, it is taken into account that the measurement of all properties of quantum particles can not be carried out in one physical process (the no-cloning theorem). For such a measurement several series of incompatible observations are needed, each series is to be carried out by means of a separate measuring instrument. Each event of measurement is a separate physical process; combination of different measurement events is performed by the Measurer - a subject capable of recognizing or not recognizing different events as similar depending on the purpose of the measurement, and capable as well of planning the measurements, of obtaining results and making conclusions. Several strategies for measuring the quantum state of photon polarization are considered; it is shown that modeling of a mixed state by a set of photon pure states is possible only if for this set in all the measurements the same measuring devices are used. It is also shown that the reduction of the quantum state is determined by the parameters of interaction of the measuring device with the measured particle. This fact removes the restrictions on the magnitudes of correlations of different observables, known as Bell's inequalities.
Peculiarities of multiqubit measurement are for the most part similar to peculiarities of measurement for qudit — quantum object with finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Three different interpretations of measurement concept are analyzed. One of those is purely quantum and is in collection, for a given state of the object to be measured, of incompatible observable measurement results in amount enough for reconstruction of the state. Two others make evident the difference between the reduced density matrix and the density matrices of physical objects involved in the measurement. It is shown that the von Neumann projectors, in combination with the concept of qudit phase space, produce an idea of a phase portrait of qudit state as a set of mathematical expectations for projectors on the possible pure states. The phase portrait is not a probability distribution since the projectors on nonorthogonal states are incompatible observables. Along with that, the phase portrait includes probability distributions for all the resolutions of identity of the qudit observable algebra. Additional peculiarities of measurement of the qudit degenerated observables, caused by the possibility of independent measurement of the observables for the particles, make possible to distinguish the local reduction of the qudit particle states from the entanglement of the local measurement results. The phase portrait of a composite system comprised by a qudit pair generates local and conditional phase portraits of particles. The entanglement is represented by the dependence of the shape of conditional phase portrait on the properties of the observable used in the measurement for the other particle. Analysis of the properties of a conditional phase portrait of a multiqubit qubits shows that absence of the entanglement is possible only in the case of substantial restrictions imposed on the method of multiqubit decomposition into qubits. Such a special method for determination of particles exists for each multiqubit state.
In the past century, experimental discoveries have witnessed phenomena in Nature which challenge our everyday classical intuition. In order to explain these facts, quantum theory was developed, which so far has been able to reproduce the observed results. However, I believe that our understanding of quantum mechanics can be significantly improved by the search for an operational meaning behind its mathematical formulation, which would help to identify the limitations and possibilities of the theory for information processing. An intriguing property of quantum theory is its intrinsic randomness. Indeed, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 questioned the completeness of quantum theory. They argued the possibility of the existence of a complete theory where variables to which we have not access determine the behaviour of physical systems, and the randomness observed in quantum mechanics is then due to our ignorance of these variables. These hidden variables theories, however, were proved not to be enough for explaining the predictions of quantum theory, as shown in the no-go theorems by Bell on quantum-nonlocality and by Kochen and Specker on quantum-contextuality. In the past decades, many experiments have corroborated the nonlocal and contextual character of Nature. However, no intuition behind these phenomena has been found, in particular about what limits their strength. In fact, special relativity alone would allow for phenomena which are more nonlocal than what quantum theory allows. Hence, much effort has been devoted to find the physical properties of quantum theory that restricts these phenomena. In this thesis, we study the constraints that arise on nonlocal and contextual phenomena when a certain exclusiveness structure compatible with quantum theory is imposed in the space of events. Here, an event denotes the situation where an outcome is obtained given that a measurement is performed on the physical system. Regarding nonlocality, we introduce a notion of orthogonality that states that events involving different outcomes of the same local measurement are exclusive, and construct constraints that the correlations among observers should satisfy. We denote this by Local Orthogonality principle (LO), which is the first intrinsically multipartite principle for bounding quantum correlations. We prove that LO identifies the supra-quantum character of some bipartite and multipartite correlations, and gets close to the quantum boundary. When studying contextuality, the same abstract event may correspond to outcomes of different measurements, which introduces a non-trivial structure in the space of events. For its study, we develop a general formalism for contextuality scenarios in the spirit of the recent approach by Cabello, Severini and Winter. In our framework, nonlocality arises as a particular case of contextuality, which allows us to study a generalization of LO. Both in nonlocality and contextuality, we find close connections to problems in combinatorics and hence use graph-theoretical tools for studying correlations. Finally, this thesis also studies the detection of nonlocal correlations. Most results on quantum nonlocality focus on few particles' experiments, while less is known about the detection of quantum nonlocality in many-body systems. Standard many-body observables involve correlations among few particles, while there is still no multipartite Bell inequality to test nonlocality merely from these data. In this thesis, we provide the first proposal for nonlocality detection in many-body systems using two-body correlations. We construct families of Bell inequalities from two-body correlators, which can detect nonlocality for systems with large number of constituents. In addition, we prove violations by systems which are relevant in nuclear and atomic physics, and show how to test these inequalities by measuring global spin components, hence opening the problem to experimental realizations.
The central problem in the quantum theory of measurement, how to describe the process of state reduction in terms of the quantum mechanical formalism, is solved on the basis of the relativity of quantal states, which implies that once the apparatus is detected in a well-defined state, the object state must reduce to a corresponding one. This is a process termed by Schrodinger disentanglement. Here, it is essential to observe that Renninger's negative result does constitute an actual measurement process. From this point of view, Heisenberg's interpretation of his microscope experiment and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen arguments are reinvestigated. Satisfactory discussions are given to various experimental situations, such as the Stern-Gerlach-type experiment, successive measurements, macroscopic measurements, and Schrodinger's cat. Finally it is proposed to regard a state vector in quantum mechanics as an irreducible physical construct, in Margenau's sense, that is not further analyzable both mathematically and conceptually.
A new approach to the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics is proposed. In this approach, the process of measurement is described in the Heisenberg picture and divided into two stages. The first stage is to transduce the measured observable to the probe observable. The second stage is to amplify the probe observable to the macroscopic meter observable. Quantum state reduction is derived, based on the quantum Bayes principle, from the object-apparatus interaction in the first stage. The dynamical process of the second stage is described as a quantum amplification with infinite gain based on nonstandard analysis.
Bell's inequalities impose an upper limit on correlations between measurements of two-photon states under the assumption that the photons play by a set of local rules rather than by quantum mechanics. Quantum theory and decades of experiments both violate this limit. Recent theoretical work in quantum foundations has demonstrated that a local realist model can explain the non-local correlations observed in experimental tests of Bell's inequality if the underlying probability distribution of the local hidden variable depends on the choice of measurement basis, or ``setting choice''. By using setting choices determined by astrophysical events in the distant past, it is possible to asymptotically guarantee that the setting choice is independent of local hidden variables which come into play around the time of the experiment, closing this ``freedom-of-choice'' loophole. Here, I report on a novel experimental test of Bell's inequality which addresses the freedom-of-choice assumption more conclusively than any other experiment to date. In this first experiment in Vienna, custom astronomical instrumentation allowed setting choices to be determined by photon emission events occurring six hundred years ago at Milky Way stars. For this experiment, I selected the stars used to maximize the extent over which any hidden influence needed to be coordinated. In addition, I characterized the group's custom instrumentation, allowing us to conclude a violation of local realism by 7 and 11 standard deviations. These results are published in Handsteiner et. al. (\textit{Phys. Rev. Lett.} 118:060401, 2017). I also describe my design, construction, and experimental characterization of a next-generation ``astronomical random number generator'', with improved capabilities and design choices that result in an improvement on the original instrumentation by an order of magnitude. Through the 1-meter telescope at the NASA/JPL Table Mountain Observatory, I observed and generated random bits from thirteen quasars with redshifts ranging from z=0.1−3.9. With physical and information-theoretic analyses, I quantify the fraction of the generated bits which are predictable by a local realist mechanism, and identify two pairs of quasars suitable for use as extragalactic sources of randomness in the next cosmic Bell test. I also propose two additional applications of such a device. The first is an experimental realization of a delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment, enabling a foundational test of wave-particle complementarity. The second is a test of the Weak Equivalence Principle, using our instrument's sub-nanosecond time resolution to observe the Crab pulsar at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Using my data from the Crab Pulsar, I report a bound on violations of Einstein's Weak Equivalence Principle complementary to recent results in the literature. Most of these results appear in Leung et. al. (arXiv:1706.02276, submitted to \textit{Physical Review X}).
In this paper, we discuss the importance of measurement in quantum mechanics and the so-called measurement problem. Any quantum system can be described as a linear combination of eigenstates of an operator representing a physical quantity; this means that the system can be in a superposition of states that corresponds to different eigenvalues, i.e., different physical outcomes, each one incompatible with the others. The measurement process converts a state of superposition (not macroscopically defined) in a well-defined state. We show that, if we describe the measurement by the standard laws of quantum mechanics, the system would preserve its state of superposition even on a macroscopic scale. Since this is not the case, we assume that a measurement does not obey to standard quantum mechanics, but to a new set of laws that form a “quantum measurement theory”.