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arXiv:quant-ph/0109146

Indistinguishability and improper mixtures

Kirkpatrick, K. A.

Published Sep 27, 2001• 11 citations
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Abstract

All quantum mixtures are what d'Espagnat has termed "improper." His "proper" mixture cannot be created -- if welcher weg, or distinguishing, information exists, an improper mixture results, while in the absence of such information, the resulting "mixture" is a pure state. D'Espagnat has claimed that an interpretation of the improper mixture in terms of subensembles leads to logical inconsistency; this claim is shown to be incorrect, as d'Espagnat's argument fails to account for the indistinguishability of the pure-state subensembles.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0109146

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All quantum mixtures are what d'Espagnat has termed "improper." His "proper" mixture cannot be created -- if welcher weg, or distinguishing, information exists, an improper mixture results, while in the absence of such information, the resulting "mixture" is a pure state. D'Espagnat has claimed that an interpretation of the improper mixture in terms of subensembles leads to logical inconsistency; this claim is shown to be incorrect, as d'Espagnat's argument fails to account for the indistinguishability of the pure-state subensembles.
Experimental evidence, the heuristics of indistinguishability, and its logical inconsistency with quantum formalism all argue against the existence of a quantum mixture uncorrelated with the exterior, that is, argue for the postulate "The state of a system uncorrelated with its exterior is pure." This is shown to be equivalent with "The state of a system describable in terms of indistinguishable pure states is pure," and with "The state of the universe is pure"; further, it yields a quantitative expression of the traditional relation of welcher Weg information to partial coherence. It is concluded that all mixtures are "improper," the trace-reduction of a composite system's pure state.
Observable dynamical quantities are described by Hermitean operators, and in the early days of quantum mechanics the correspondence was believed to be one-to-one. It was assumed that (i) every observable can be related to some Hermitean operator and (ii) every Hermitean operator corresponds to one observable. The arguments concerning the difference between proper and improper mixtures are conceived of for the benefit of the physicists with a "realist" turn of mind who, prima facie, would tend to consider that, quite on the contrary, the statement in question is meaningful and true. Two ensembles are said to be different with respect to some observable A if the statistical frequencies of the prospective measurement outcomes on observable A are different on the two ensembles. Also, two ensembles are said to be different if there exists at least one observable A with respect to which they are different.
We study improper mixtures from a quantum logical and geometrical point of view. Taking into account the fact that improper mixtures do not admit an ignorance interpretation and must be considered as states in their own right, we do not follow the standard approach which considers improper mixtures as measures over the algebra of projections. Instead of it, we use the convex set of states in order to construct a new lattice whose atoms are all physical states: pure states and improper mixtures. This is done in order to overcome one of the problems which appear in the standard quantum logical formalism, namely, that for a subsystem of a larger system in an entangled state, the conjunction of all actual properties of the subsystem does not yield its actual state. In fact, its state is an improper mixture and cannot be represented in the von Neumann lattice as a minimal property which determines all other properties as is the case for pure states or classical systems. The new lattice also contains all propositions of the von Neumann lattice. We argue that this extension expresses in an algebraic form the fact that—alike the classical case—quantum interactions produce nontrivial correlations between the systems. Finally, we study the maps which can be defined between the extended lattice of a compound system and the lattices of its subsystems.