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arXiv:quant-ph/0507205

Quantum phenomena may have macroscopic counterparts

Inge Svein Helland

Published Jul 21, 2005• 1 citation
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Abstract

From various points of view it is argued that one may find phenomena similar to the quantum effects also in macroscopic cases. This forces one to give up as a general requirement the assumption of realism as formulated by Gill and others. For any potential set of experiments on a limited set of units, we find it useful to introduce for these units the concept of a total parameter, a set of parameters which is so large that a joint value is meaningless.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0507205

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From various points of view it is argued that one may find phenomena similar to the quantum effects also in macroscopic cases. This forces one to give up as a general requirement the assumption of realism as formulated by Gill and others. For any potential set of experiments on a limited set of units, we find it useful to introduce for these units the concept of a total parameter, a set of parameters which is so large that a joint value is meaningless.
Among the various "no-go theorems" in the foundations of quantum mechanics, Bell inequalities are among the few, which do not implicitly rely on the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. Instead, Bell inequalities are commonly understood to rest on Kolmogorov's theory of probability and a "locality" assumption. Physical evidence supporting their violation is hence taken as evidence against at least one of these two assumptions. This work provides a comprehensive analysis of the physical debate on Bell inequalities from the point of view of Kolmogorov's theory of probability, focusing on the Bell-Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt inequality (BCHSH inequality). The central contribution is the motivation and mathematical study of the notion of contextuality in Bell experiments: in so-called contextual Bell models the detectors themselves behave randomly and the distribution of the random detector parameters depends on the chosen detector settings. It is shown how even "classical" Bell experiments motivate such a description. The need to account for contextuality was pointed out before by de la Peña, Cetto, Brody, Lochak, Bohm, Hiley and others. A broad class of contextual models is proven to satisfy the BCHSH inequality, thereby generalizing a previous result by Gill and Lambare. Nonetheless, even under strong locality requirements, contextual Bell models may violate the BCHSH inequality: based on work by Popescu and Rohrlich, we consider a "proof of concept" example exhibiting the maximum possible violation. Contrary to the much debated "loopholes" in empirical tests of Bell inequalities, contextuality thus reveals a conceptual misunderstanding in the physical conclusions commonly drawn from Bell inequality violations.
Heisenberg, Bohr and others were forced to renounce on the description of the objective reality as the aim of physics because of the paradoxical quantum phenomena observed on the atomic level. The contemporary quantum mechanics created on the base of their positivism point of view must divide the world into speakable apparatus which amplifies microscopic events to macroscopic consequences and unspeakable quantum system. Examination of the quantum phenomena corroborates the confidence expressed by creators of quantum theory that the renunciation of realism should not apply on our everyday macroscopic world. Nanostructures may be considered for the present as a boundary of realistic description for all phenomena including the quantum one.
Macroscopic realism is the thesis that macroscopically observable properties must always have definite values. The idea was introduced by Leggett and Garg (1985), who wished to show a conflict with the predictions of quantum theory, by using it to derive an inequality that quantum theory violates. However, Leggett and Garg's analysis required not just the assumption of macroscopic realism per se, but also that the observable properties could be measured non-invasively. In recent years there has been increasing interest in experimental tests of the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality, but it has remained a matter of controversy whether this second assumption is a reasonable requirement for a macroscopic realist view of quantum theory. In a recent critical assessment Maroney and Timpson (2014) identified three different categories of macroscopic realism, and argued that only the simplest category could be ruled out by Leggett-Garg inequality violations. Allen, Maroney, and Gogioso (2016) then showed that the second of these approaches was also incompatible with quantum theory in Hilbert spaces of dimension 4 or higher. However, we show that the distinction introduced by Maroney and Timpson between the second and third approaches is not noise tolerant, so unfortunately Allen's result, as given, is not directly empirically testable. In this paper we replace Maroney and Timpson's three categories with a parameterization of macroscopic realist models, which can be related to experimental observations in a noise tolerant way, and recover the original definitions in the noise-free limit. We show how this parameterization can be used to experimentally rule out classes of macroscopic realism in Hilbert spaces of dimension 3 or higher, without any use of the non-invasive measurability assumption. Even for relatively low precision experiments, this will rule out the original category of macroscopic realism, that is tested by the Leggett-Garg inequality, while as the precision of the experiments increases, all cases of the second category and many cases of the third category, will become experimentally ruled out.