Operation-valued stochastic processes give a formalization of the concept of continuous (in time) measurements in quantum mechanics. In this article, a first stage M of a measuring apparatus coupled to the system S is explicitly introduced, and continuous measurement of some observables of M is considered (one can speak of an indirect continuous measurement on S). When the degrees of freedom of the measuring apparatus M are eliminated and the weak coupling limit is taken, it is shown that an operation-valued stochastic process describing a direct continuous observation of the system S is obtained.
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.
One of the broadest concepts of measurement in quantum theory is the generalized measurement. Another paradigm of measurement---arising naturally in quantum optics, among other fields---is that of continuous-time measurements, which can be seen as the limit of a consecutive sequence of weak measurements. They are naturally described in terms of stochastic processes, or time-dependent random variables. We show that any generalized measurement can be decomposed as a sequence of weak measurements with a mathematical limit as a continuous stochastic process. We give an explicit construction for any generalized measurement, and prove that the resulting continuous evolution, in the long-time limit, collapses the state of the quantum system to one of the final states generated by the generalized measurement, being decomposed, with the correct probabilities. A prominent feature of the construction is the presence of a feedback mechanism---the instantaneous choice weak measurement at a given time depends on the outcomes of earlier measurements. For a generalized measurement with
n outcomes, this information is captured by a real
n-vector on an
n-simplex, which obeys a simple classical stochastic evolution.