arXiv:2511.03455

Universal first-passage time statistics for quantum diffusion

Guido Ladenburger, Finn Schmolke, Eric Lutz

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechSubmitted Nov 5, 2025• Announced Nov 6, 2025• 0 citations

Abstract

First-passage phenomena play a fundamental role in classical stochastic processes. We here exactly solve a quantum first-passage time problem for quantum diffusion driven by measurement noise, a generalization of classical Brownian motion. Such continuous monitoring may trap the measured quantum system in a decoherence-free subspace, a fraction of the available state space that is isolated from the surroundings, and thus plays an important role in quantum information science. We analytically determine the first-passage time distribution, whose form neither depends on the system Hamiltonian nor on the measurement operator, and is therefore universal. These results provide a general framework to investigate the first-passage statistics of diffusive quantum trajectories.

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