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Physical Review A

Quantum-mechanical models of position measurements

Masanao Ozawa

Published Feb 1, 1990• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A systematic construction of exactly solvable models of interactions between the measuring apparatus and the particle whose position is to be measured is shown. The two types of root-mean-square errors are calculated for these models and many new models with better statistics than the standard von Neumann model are continuously found. The best among them is the model which has been shown to circumvent the standard quantum limit for the position monitoring. A feature of the models similar to Bondurant's improvement of the interferometric position measurement is also pointed out.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.41.1735

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A systematic construction of exactly solvable models of interactions between the measuring apparatus and the particle whose position is to be measured is shown. The two types of root-mean-square errors are calculated for these models and many new models with better statistics than the standard von Neumann model are continuously found. The best among them is the model which has been shown to circumvent the standard quantum limit for the position monitoring. A feature of the models similar to Bondurant's improvement of the interferometric position measurement is also pointed out.
In order to generalize the Wigner formula for the joint probability distribution of successive canonical measurements of discrete observables to continuous observables, a mathematical model is investigated of a canonical approximate measurement of an arbitrary observable, which generalizes von Neumann’s model of measuring interaction and Davies’s covariant instrument for approximate position measurement. Calculations of two types of root-mean-square errors show that this model clears certain requirements for good approximate measurements. A modified Wigner formula for successive canonical approximate measurements of arbitrary observables is established. It is also shown that the canonical approximate measurement of a discrete observable is reduced to the conventional measurement satisfying the von Neumann–Lüders collapse postulate by a minor modification in the process of measurement.
This is the first of two papers showing that the quantum problem of measurement remains unsolved even when the initial state of the apparatus is described by a statistical operator and when the results of measurement have a small probability of being erroneous. A realistic treatment of the measurement of observables of microscopic objects (e.g., the position or the spin of an electron) by means of observables of macroscopic apparatus (e.g., the position of a spot on a photographic plate) requires the consideration of errors. The first paper considers measurement procedures of the following type: An initial eigenstate of the object observable leads to a final statistical operator of the object plus apparatus which describes a mixture of “approximate” eigenstates of the apparatus observable. It is proved that each of a large class of initial states leads to a final statistical operator which does not describe any mixture containing even one “approximate” eigenstate of the apparatus observable. INTRODUCTION Several writers have tried to solve the quantum-mechanical problem of measurement through one or both of the following proposals: (a) describthe initial state of the measuring apparatus by a projection onto a subspace of the associated Hilbert space or by a statistical operator, thus taking into account the practical impossibility of knowing the exact quantum state of a macroscopic object; (b) recognizing that there may be some physical inaccuracy, such as a small error in the position of a pointer needle, in the final registration of the outcome of the measurement by the apparatus.
This is the first of two papers showing that the quantum problem of measurement remains unsolved even when the initial state of the apparatus is described by a statistical operator and when the results of measurement have a small probability of being erroneous. A realistic treatment of the measurement of observables of microscopic objects (e.g., the position or the spin of an electron) by means of observables of macroscopic apparatus (e.g., the position of a spot on a photographic plate) requires the consideration of errors. The first paper considers measurement procedures of the following type: An initial eigenstate of the object observable leads to a final statistical operator of the object plus apparatus which describes a mixture of "approximate" eigenstates of the apparatus observable. It is proved that each of a large class of initial states leads to a final statistical operator which does not describe any mixture containing even one "approximate" eigenstate of the apparatus observable.
Recent years have witnessed a controversy over Heisenberg's famous error-disturbance relation. Here the conflict is resolved by way of an analysis of the possible conceptualizations of measurement error and disturbance in quantum mechanics. Two approaches to adapting the classic notion of root-mean-square error to quantum measurements are discussed. One is based on the concept of a noise operator; its natural operational content is that of a mean deviation of the values of two observables measured jointly, and thus its applicability is limited to cases where such joint measurements are available. The second error measure quantifies the differences between two probability distributions obtained in separate runs of measurements and is of unrestricted applicability. We show that there are no nontrivial unconditional joint-measurement bounds for state-dependent errors in the conceptual framework discussed here, while Heisenberg-type measurement uncertainty relations for state-independent errors have been proven.
Quantum measurements of physical quantities are often described as ideal measurements. However, only a few measurements fulfil the conditions of ideal measurements. The aim of the present work is to describe real position measurements with detectors that are able to detect single particles. For this purpose, a detector model is developed that can describe the time dependence of the interaction between a non-relativistic particle and a detector. The example of a position measurement shows that this interaction can be described with the methods of quantum mechanics. At the beginning of a position measurement, the detector behaves as a target consisting of a large number of quantum mechanical systems. In the first reaction, the incident particle interacts with a single atom, electron or nucleus, but not with the whole detector. This reaction and all following reactions are quantum mechanical processes. At the end of the measurement, the detector can be considered as a classical apparatus. A detector is neither a quantum mechanical system nor a classical apparatus. The detector model explains why one obtains a well-defined result for each individual position measurement. It further explains that, in general, it is impossible to predict the outcome of an individual measurement.
We present an idealized model for a sequence of position measurements, and we then take an appropriate limit in which the measurements become continuous. The measurements lead to fluctuations without systematic dissipation, and they rapidly destroy off-diagonal terms in the position basis; thus the pointer basis is position. A modification of the model incorporates systematic dissipation via a feedback mechanism; in the modified model there is no decay of off-diagonal coherence in the position basis.