COHERENT STATES AND OPEN QUANTUM SYSTEMS: A COMMENT ON THE STERN-GERLACH EXPERIMENT AND SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT

The full story of the Stern-Gerlach experiment and its reception, interpretation and final understanding has many unexpected surprises. Here, we review the history and the context of the proposal, the experiment, and the subsequent story of the aftermath. We also discuss the story of the possible Stern-Gerlach experiment for free electrons etc. Finally, we comment on the remarkable career of Otto Stern.

arXiv:1805.09412May 23, 201812 citations

COHERENT STATES AND OPEN QUANTUM SYSTEMS: A COMMENT ON THE STERN-GERLACH EXPERIMENT AND SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT

H. J. Carmichael, P. Kochan, Lin Tian

Published May 1, 1994• 10 citations

Publisher

DOI: 10.1142/9789814503839_0006

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A Stern-Gerlach setup for the measurement on a quantum system (spin-$$

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) with a macroscopic quantum apparatus (the particle trajectory) produces a Schr\"odinger-cat-like superposition in which the spin states correlate with wave packets centered around macroscopically distinguishable positions and momenta. When an interaction with an environment is included, the pure density matrix of the system-apparatus combination reduces to a statistical mixture in the spin space, and exact solutions show that the decoherence time for this reduction goes inversly as the macroscopic separation between the two parts of the superposition correlating with up- and down-spin states. This is consistent with Zurek's approximate result for the decoherence time, and the persistence of system-meter correlations at large times makes it an interesting candidate to look at experimentally.