Sojourn Times and First Hitting Times in Stochastic Mechanics

Wojciech Jaworski, David M. Wardlaw

We show that a useful concept of the time spent by a quantum-mechanical particle in a given spatial region can be expressed in terms of a Hermitian sojourn time operator. Mean values of this operator give the mean sojourn time (dwell time) of the particle. We show that the sojourn time operators occur in a natural way in first-order perturbation theory for the barrier perturbed by any finite-range potential. The perturbed S operator, and also the effect of the perturbation on the change of observables due to the scattering, are, to a first-order approximation, fully expressible in terms of sojourn time operators. We anticipate that this result can be generalized to the case when the translational motion of the tunneling particle is weakly coupled to additional degrees of freedom. As a specific example of such a system, we explicitly reconsider the Larmor clock, originally proposed as a device measuring interaction times. We show that the change of the spin components, to a first-order approximation, is indeed fully expressible in terms of a sojourn time operator. In particular, when set as a clock, the system measures mean values of the sojourn time operator or real parts of some of its matrix elements.

Yihang Sun, Huaijin Wang, Patrick Hayden +1 more

We present the first analytical study of ECD, focusing on the one-dimensional setting for this first installment. We formalize a stochastic ECD dynamics (sECD) with energy-preserving noise, as well as a quantum analog of the ECD Hamiltonian (qECD), providing the foundation for a quantum algorithm through Hamiltonian simulation in a tractable model where the barrier-crossing mechanism can be computed explicitly. For one-dimensional double-well objectives in the under-guessing regime, we compute the expected dynamical hitting times from a local minimum to the global minimum. We prove that both sECD and qECD exhibit exponential improvements in continuous hitting time relative to their respective gradient-based baselines, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and quantum tunneling walk (QTW). For objectives with tall barriers, qECD admits a further hitting time improvement over sECD. Mechanistically, ECD sidesteps the exponential cost associated with rare-escape events of SGD from local minima by moving from dissipative to energy-conserving dynamics.

Ian M Davies

Khavtgain Namsrai

Gian Fabrizio De Angelis

Wojciech Jaworski

The concept of sojourn time and a sojourn time operator, aimed at describing the length of time spent by a quantum mechanical system in a given subspace of states, is investigated. A general rigorous definition to the sojourn time operator is given and some of its properties are studied. In particular, it is shown that the usual Born’s probability interpretation of the associated spectral measure yields strange, if not paradoxical, results, resembling the well-known quantum mechanical Zeno paradox. Also a specific example of a free nonrelativistic particle is considered. Here it is proven that the probability Pt(Ω) of the particle being present in a volume Ω at time t cannot vanish on a set of t having nonzero measure. This implies that the sojourn time in Ω never vanishes, and that zero is never an eigenvalue of the sojourn time operator. It is also shown that for a very general class of sets Ω, including all bounded sets, the sojourn time turns out to be bounded with a bound independent of the initial state of the particle. Correspondingly, the sojourn time operator turns out to be a bounded one.