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arXiv:quant-ph/9801034

Minimum Uncertainty for Transit-Time

Jonathan Oppenheim, Benni Reznik, William George Unruh

Published Jan 16, 1998• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Using various model clocks it has been shown that the time-of-arrival cannot be measured more accurately than 1/E where E is the kinetic energy of a free particle. However, this result has never been proved. In this paper, we show that a violation of the above limitation for the transit-time, implies a violation of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation.

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Using various model clocks it has been shown that the time-of-arrival cannot be measured more accurately than 1/E where E is the kinetic energy of a free particle. However, this result has never been proved. In this paper, we show that a violation of the above limitation for the transit-time, implies a violation of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation.
After discussing the role of time in both General Relativity and Quantum Gravity, it is argued that even in ordinary Quantum Mechanics, the role of time is ambiguous. A rather surprising result is that measurements of the time-of-arrival of a free particle must always be more inaccurate than 1/E where E is the kinetic energy of the particle. This inaccuracy is not related to the Heisenberg uncertainty relations. It is a dynamical relation which applies to individual measurements of a single quantity.
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.
In quantum mechanics, time plays a role unlike any other observable. We find that measuring whether an event happened, and measuring when an event happened are fundamentally different - the two measurements do not correspond to compatible observables and interfere with each other. We also propose a basic limitation on measurements of the arrival time of a free particle given by 1/Ek where Ek is the particle's kinetic energy. The temporal order of events is also an ambiguous concept in quantum mechanics. It is not always possible to determine whether one event lies in the future or past of another event. One cannot measure whether one particle arrives to a particular location before or after another particle if they arrive within a time of 1/E of each other, where E is the total kinetic energy of the two particles. These new inaccuracy limitations are dynamical in nature, and fundamentally different from the Heisenberg uncertainty relations. They refer to individual measurements of a single quantity. It is hoped that by understanding the role of time in quantum mechanics, we may gain new insight into the role of time in a quantum theory of gravity.
Heisenberg guessed, after he established the matrix quantum mechanics, that the non-commutativity of the matrices of position and momentum implied that the position and momentum of a particle could not be precisely simultaneously determined. He consequently conjectured that time and energy should also have a similar relationship. Soon after, Robertson derived an inequality concerning the space coordinate and momentum, which was thought to be the mathematical expression of the uncertainty relation guessed by Heisenberg. Since then, people have tried various devices to prove the correctness of these two relations. However, no one conducted a careful analysis of Heisenberg’s primary paper. In this work, we point out some serious problems in Heisenberg’s paper and the literature talking about the uncertainty relationships: the physical concepts involved in the uncertainty relations are not clear; one physical concept had more than one explanation, i.e., switching concepts; there has never been measurement experiment to support the relations. The conclusions are that the so-called coordinate–momentum uncertainty relation has never been related to actual measurement and there does not exist a time–energy uncertainty relation.
Our formalism for describing quantum measurements is generalized to the multitime case and used to derive rigorous time-energy uncertainty relations. For a free particle, we find that $T\ensuremath{\delta}H\ensuremath{\ge}\frac{1}{2}$, where $\ensuremath{\delta}H$ is the dispersion in energy and TTT is the measurement duration as given by an external clock of arbitrarily high accuracy. Moreover, any system used as a clock obeys $\ensuremath{\delta}t\ensuremath{\delta}H\ensuremath{\ge}\frac{1}{2}$, where $\ensuremath{\delta}t$ is the dispersion in the values of time as measured by the system.