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Experimental Tests of the Projection Postulate

Edward J. Gillis

Published Jan 13, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Bell [Helv. Phys.Act. 48 1975] described an idealized test of the projection postulate in order to illustrate the ambiguities in the experimental predictions of quantum theory. An approach to the implementation of such tests is outlined here, based on the interesting logical relationship between the projection postulate and the no-superluminal-signaling principle. Gisin's theorem [Helv. Phys. Act. 62 1989] shows that the no-signaling principle implies that any description of projection at the elementary level must be nondeterministic. The lack of determinism means that information cannot be instantiated in a reproducible and transmittable form in isolated microsystems. The implied limitation on information allows one to interpret the no-signaling principle in purely physical terms as a prohibition of superluminal information transmission. This prohibition, in turn, imposes tight constraints on the connection between projection and elementary processes, leading to a specific hypothesis about how projection effects originate. The hypothesis serves as the basis for the experimental proposal.

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Bell [Helv. Phys.Act. 48 1975] described an idealized test of the projection postulate in order to illustrate the ambiguities in the experimental predictions of quantum theory. An approach to the implementation of such tests is outlined here, based on the interesting logical relationship between the projection postulate and the no-superluminal-signaling principle. Gisin's theorem [Helv. Phys. Act. 62 1989] shows that the no-signaling principle implies that any description of projection at the elementary level must be nondeterministic. The lack of determinism means that information cannot be instantiated in a reproducible and transmittable form in isolated microsystems. The implied limitation on information allows one to interpret the no-signaling principle in purely physical terms as a prohibition of superluminal information transmission. This prohibition, in turn, imposes tight constraints on the connection between projection and elementary processes, leading to a specific hypothesis about how projection effects originate. The hypothesis serves as the basis for the experimental proposal.
Signal causality, the prohibition of superluminal information transmission, is the fundamental property shared by quantum measurement theory and relativity, and it is the key to understanding the connection between nonlocal measurement effects and elementary interactions. To prevent those effects from transmitting information between the generating and observing process, they must be induced by the kinds of entangling interactions that constitute measurements, as implied in the Projection Postulate. They must also be nondeterministic as reflected in the Born Probability Rule. The nondeterminism of entanglement-generating processes explains why the relevant types of information cannot be instantiated in elementary systems, and why the sequencing of nonlocal effects is, in principle, unobservable. This perspective suggests a simple hypothesis about nonlocal transfers of amplitude during entangling interactions, which yields straightforward experimental consequences.
The assumption that wave function collapse is a real occurrence has very interesting consequences - both experimental and theoretical. Besides predicting observable deviations from linear evolution, it implies that these deviations must originate in nondeterministic effects at the elementary level in order to prevent superluminal signaling, as demonstrated by Gisin. This lack of determinism implies that information cannot be instantiated in a reproducible form in isolated microsystems (as illustrated by the No-cloning theorem). By stipulating that information is a reproducible and referential property of physical systems, one can formulate the no-signaling principle in strictly physical terms as a prohibition of the acquisition of information about spacelike-separated occurrences. This formulation provides a new perspective on the relationship between relativity and spacetime structure, and it imposes tight constraints on the way in which collapse effects are induced. These constraints indicate that wave function collapse results from (presumably small) nondeterministic deviations from linear evolution associated with nonlocally entangling interactions. This hypothesis can be formalized in a stochastic collapse equation and used to assess the feasibility of testing for collapse effects.
The quantum foundations literature contains dozens of "no-signaling" arguments that rely on the Born rule or, more generally, the positive operator-valued measure (POVM) framework to show that the resources of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM) cannot be used to send superluminal signals. What these arguments typically establish, however, is not a prohibition on superluminal signaling per se, but the seemingly stronger claim that signaling at any speed between mutually isolated systems is forbidden. This paper gives a precise formulation of this claim, the no-signaling hypothesis, and investigates the following converse question: under what additional assumptions does it imply that all experimental outcome probabilities are described by POVMs? Surprisingly few are needed: given the standard NRQM representation of composite experiments and two textbook claims about marginal probabilities, the no-signaling hypothesis is equivalent to the universality of the POVM framework. More broadly, by formalizing the relevant concepts and deriving the logical relationships between them, the paper shows that the no-signaling hypothesis can be used to derive most, though not all, of the probability-generating fragment of NRQM. The resulting map of implications clarifies which common postulates of NRQM are logically interrelated and which can be modified independently.
Abstract There is a growing interest, both from the theoretical as well as experimental side, to test the validity of the quantum superposition principle, and of theories which explicitly violate it by adding nonlinear terms to the Schrödinger equation. We review the original argument elaborated by Gisin (1989 Helv. Phys. Acta 62 363), which shows that the non-superluminal-signaling condition implies that the dynamics of the density matrix must be linear. This places very strong constraints on the permissible modifications of the Schrödinger equation, since they have to give rise, at the statistical level, to a linear evolution for the density matrix. The derivation is done in a heuristic way here and is appropriate for the students familiar with the textbook quantum mechanics and the language of density matrices.
This paper explores the status of the von Neumann-Lüders state transition rule (the “projection postulate”) within “real-logic” quantum logic. The entire discussion proceeds from a reading of the Lüders rule according to which, although idealized in applying only to “minimally disturbing” measurements, it nevertheless makes empirical claims and is not a purely mathematical theorem. An argument (due to Friedman and Putnam) is examined to the effect that QL has an explanatory advantage over Copenhagen and other interpretations which relativize truth-value assignments to experimental arrangements. Two versions of QL, the lattice-theoretic (LT) and partial-Boolean-algebra (PBA), are considered. It turns out that the projection postulate is intimately connected with the choice of conditional connective for QL. The effect of the projection postulate is obtained with the Sasaki conditional. However, this choice is found to require extra assumptions, on both the LT and PBA versions, which are either just as ad hoc as the projection postulate itself or indefensible from within the real-logic QL framework.