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arXiv:quant-ph/9610033

Interaction-Free Measurements

Lev Vaidman A

Published Oct 21, 1996• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A brief review of interaction-free measurements (IFM) is presented. The IFM is a solution of a quantum puzzle: How to test a bomb which explodes on every test without exploding it? This paper was given in the Oxford conference in honor of Roger Penrose.
DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/9610033

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Abstract I am greatly indebted to Roger Penrose. I have learned very much from his papers, from his exciting books, and from our (too short) conversations. I am most grateful to Roger for developing the idea of Avshalom Elitzur and myself on interaction-free measurements (IFM). The version of IFM Penrose described in his book (1994) is conceptually different from our original proposal, and although it is much more difficult for practical applications it has the advantage of demonstrating even more striking quantum phenomena. So I will start with presenting Penrose’s version of IFM.
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It is now well established that the presence of an opaque classical object can be unambiguously determined by an "interaction-free" measurement (IFM), where the object and the probe never directly interact. For quantum objects, we examine "interaction-free" measurement (the object wavefunction is unchanged) and "interaction-free" preparation (the object wavefunction is changed without physical interaction) and find that in general, neither is possible. We propose using high efficiency IFM's as a quantum information bus to connect disjoint quantum systems.
In ``interaction-free'' measurements, one typically wants to detect the presence of an object without touching it with even a single photon. One often imagines a bomb whose trigger is an extremely sensitive measuring device whose presence we would like to detect without triggering it. We point out that all such measuring devices have a maximum sensitivity set by the uncertainty principle, and thus can only determine whether a measurement is ``interaction-free'' to within a finite minimum resolution. We further discuss exactly what can be achieved with the proposed ``interaction-free'' measurement schemes.