Continual Measurements in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Stochastic Calculus

Alberto Barchielli

Alberto Barchielli, Alexander Semenovich Holevo

Jean-Claude Zambrini, Kunio Yasue

Alberto Barchielli

Continuous (in time) measurements can be introduced in quantum mechanics by using operation-valued measures and quantum stochastic calculus. In this paper quantum stochastic calculus is used for showing the connections between measurement theory and open-system theory. In particular, it is shown how continuous measurements are strictly related to the concept of output channels, introduced in the framework of quantum stochastic differential equations by Gardiner and Collet.

Toru Fuda

Alberto Barchielli, G. Lupieri

The physical idea of a continual observation on a quantum system has been recently formalized by means of the concept of operation valued stochastic process (OVSP). In this article, it is shown how the formalism of quantum stochastic calculus of Hudson and Parthasarathy allows, in a simple way, for constructing a large class of OVSP’s that in particular contains the quantum counting processes of Davies and Srinivas and continual ‘‘Gaussian’’ measurements. This result is obtained by means of a stochastic dilation of the OVSP’s: at the level of the enlarged system probabilities turn out to be expressed in terms of projection valued measures associated with certain time-dependent, commuting, self-adjoint operators.