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arXiv:quant-ph/0205136 · Physical Review A

Quantum time-of-flight measurements: Kicked clock versus continuous clock

Daniel Alonso, R. Sala Mayato, Juan Gonzalo Muga

Published Mar 17, 2003• 19 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The measurement of time durations or instants of occurrence of events has been frequently modeled ``operationally'' by coupling the system of interest to a ``clock.'' According to several of these models, the operational approach is limited at low energies because the perturbation of the clock does not allow to reproduce accurately the corresponding ideal time quantity, defined for the system in isolation. We show that, for a time-of-flight measurement model that can be set to measure dwell or arrival times, these limitations may be overcome by extending the range of energies where the clock works properly using pulsed couplings rather than continuous ones.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.67.032105

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The measurement of time durations or instants of occurrence of events has been frequently modeled operationally'' by coupling the system of interest to a clock.'' According to several of these models, the operational approach is limited at low energies because the perturbation of the clock does not allow to reproduce accurately the corresponding ideal time quantity, defined for the system in isolation. We show that, for a time-of-flight measurement model that can be set to measure dwell or arrival times, these limitations may be overcome by extending the range of energies where the clock works properly using pulsed couplings rather than continuous ones.
We consider a number of aspects of the problem of defining time observables in quantum theory. Time observables are interesting quantities in quantum theory because they often cannot be associated with self-adjoint operators. Their definition therefore touches on foundational issues in quantum theory. Various operational approaches to defining time observables have been proposed in the past. Two of the most common are those based on pulsed measurements in the form of strings of projection operators and continuous measurements in the form of complex potentials. One of the major achievements of this thesis is to prove that these two operational approaches are equivalent. However operational approaches are somewhat unsatisfying by themselves. To provide a definition of time observables which is not linked to a particular measurement scheme we employ the decoherent, or consistent, histories approach to quantum theory. We focus on the arrival time, one particular example of a time observable, and we use the relationship between pulsed and continuous measurements to relate the decoherent histories approach to one based on complex potentials. This lets us compute the arrival time probability distribution in decoherent histories and we show that it agrees with semiclassical expectations in the right limit. We do this both for a free particle and for a particle coupled to an environment. Finally, we consider how the results discussed in this thesis relate to those derived by coupling a particle to a model clock. We show that for a general class of clock models the probabilities thus measured can be simply related to the ideal ones computed via decoherent histories.
A clock is a dynamical system which passes through a succession of states at constant time intervals. If coupled to another system, it can measure the duration of a physical process and even keep a permanent record of it, such as in a time-of-flight experiment or in observing the lifetime of an unstable atom. A clock can also be used to control the duration of a process, e.g., the precession of a spin in a magnetic field which is turned on and off at prescribed times. This article shows how to construct time-independent Hamiltonians describing these possible uses of a quantum clock. As expected, a good time resolution entails a large energy exchange between the clock and the other system, thereby modifying the evolution of the latter. This evolution may even be halted by using a clock which is too precise (this is the quantum analog of Zeno’s paradox).
It is argued that the time of arrival cannot be precisely defined and measured in quantum mechanics. By constructing explicit toy models of a measurement, we show that for a free particle it cannot be measured more accurately then $\ensuremath{\Delta}{t}_{A}\ensuremath{\sim}{1/E}_{k},$ where Ek{E}_{k}Ek​ is the initial kinetic energy of the particle. With a better accuracy, particles reflect off the measuring device, and the resulting probability distribution becomes distorted. It is shown that a time-of-arrival operator cannot exist, and that approximate time-of-arrival operators do not correspond to the measurements considered here.
Uncertainty relations play a crucial role in quantum mechanics. Well-defined methods exist for the derivation of such uncertainties for pairs of observables. Other approaches also allow the formulation of time-energy uncertainty relations, even though time is not an operator in standard quantum mechanics. However, in these cases, different approaches are associated with different meanings and interpretations for these relations. The one of interest here revolves around the idea of whether quantum mechanics inherently imposes a fundamental minimum duration for energy measurements with a certain precision. In our study, we investigate within the Page and Wootters timeless framework how energy measurements modify the relative "flow of time'' between internal and external clocks. This provides a unified framework for discussing the subject, allowing us to recover previous results and derive new ones. In particular, we show that the duration of an energy measurement carried out by an external system cannot be performed arbitrarily fast from the perspective of the internal clock. Moreover, we show that during any energy measurement the evolution given by the internal clock is non-unitary.
A number of approaches to the problem of defining arrival- and dwell-time probabilities in quantum theory makes use of idealized models of clocks. An interesting question is the extent to which the probabilities obtained in this way are related to standard semiclassical results. In this paper, we explore this question using a reasonably general clock model, solved using path-integral methods. We find that, in the weak-coupling regime, where the energy of the clock is much less than the energy of the particle it is measuring, the probability for the clock pointer can be expressed in terms of the probability current in the case of arrival times, and the dwell-time operator in the case of dwell times, the expected semiclassical results. In the regime of strong system-clock coupling, we find that the arrival-time probability is proportional to the kinetic-energy density, consistent with an earlier model involving a complex potential. We argue that, properly normalized, this may be the generically expected result in this regime. We show that these conclusions are largely independent of the form of the clock Hamiltonian.