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arXiv:quant-ph/9905030

A Realizable, Non-Null Schroedinger's Cat Experiment

Martin S. Altschul, Brett Altschul

Published May 10, 1999• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Working from the Schroedinger's Cat paradigm, a series of experiments are constructed. The Bedford-Wang experiment is examined, and the ambiguity in its meaning is addressed. We eliminate this ambiguity by abandoning the idea of the triggering event, replacing the two-state system with a mirror that undergoes wave packet spreading. This creates an experimentally testable version of a modified Schroedinger's Cat experiment for which a null result is not the obvious outcome.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/9905030

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Working from the Schroedinger's Cat paradigm, a series of experiments are constructed. The Bedford-Wang experiment is examined, and the ambiguity in its meaning is addressed. We eliminate this ambiguity by abandoning the idea of the triggering event, replacing the two-state system with a mirror that undergoes wave packet spreading. This creates an experimentally testable version of a modified Schroedinger's Cat experiment for which a null result is not the obvious outcome.
The quantum state of Schroedinger's cat is usually incorrectly described as a superposition of "dead" and "alive," despite an argument by Rinner and Werner that, locally, the cat should be considered to be in a mixture of non-superposed states. Here, it is rigorously proven that the cat is not in a superposition. This is central to the measurement problem. Nonlocal two-photon interferometry experiments throw further light on the measurement state by probing the effect of a variable phase factor inserted between its superposed terms. These experiments demonstrate that both subsystems really are in locally mixed states rather than superpositions, and they tell us what the measurement state superposition actually superposes. They show that measurement transfers the coherence in Schroedinger's nuclear superposition neither to the cat nor to the nucleus, but only to the correlations between them. This explains the collapse process--but not its subsequent irreversible dissipation--within the context of unitary dynamics with no need for external entities such as the environment, a human mind, other worlds, or collapse mechanisms.
Schrodinger's Cat: Empirical research into the radical subjective solution of the measurement problem\n\nDick J. Bierman & Stephen Whitmarsh\n\n \n\nThe most controversial of all solutions of the measurement problem holds that a measurement is not completed until a conscious observation is made.\n\nIn other words quantum physics is a science of potentialities and the measurement i.c. the conscious observation brings about the reality by reducing the state vector to one of the Eigen-states.\n\nIn a series of experiments modeled after the famous experiment by the Shimony group we have explored the brain responses of observers of a quantum event. \n\nIn about 50% of the exosures this quantum event had already been observed about one second earlier by another person. This random manipulation was unknown to the final observer. \n\nThe first experiment along these lines gave suggestive evidence for a difference in brain responses dependent on the manipulation. In subsequent experiments quantum events were mixed with classical events and the results of these experiments that have been reported elsewhere were ambiguous. \n\nIn a final experiment we are trying to solve the paradoxical results obtained so far. In this experiment the final observer receives detailed information about the type of event that (s)he observes. Also the experimental protocol is such that not only pre-observed events cannot be distinguished from not pre-observed events on the basis of their physical characteristic but neither on the basis of inter-event time distributions.
The entangled state that results when a detector measures a superposed quantum system has spawned decades of concern about the problem of definite outcomes or "Schrodinger's cat." This state seems to describe a detector in an indefinite or "smeared" situation of indicating two macroscopic configurations simultaneously. This would be paradoxical. Since all entangled states are known to have nonlocal properties, and since measurements have obvious nonlocal characteristics, it's natural to turn to nonlocality experiments for insight into this question. Unlike the measurement situation where the phase is fixed at zero for perfect correlations, nonlocality experiments cover the full range of superposition phases and can thus show precisely what entangled states superpose. For two-state systems, these experiments reveal that the measurement state is not a superposition of two macroscopically different detector states but instead a superposition of two coherent correlations between distinct detector states and corresponding system states. In the measurement situation (i.e. at zero phase), and assuming the Schrodinger's cat scenario, the entangled state can be read as follows: An undecayed nucleus is perfectly correlated with an alive cat, AND a decayed nucleus is perfectly correlated with a dead cat, where "AND" indicates the superposition. This is not paradoxical.
Schrodinger's cat and Wigner's friend paradoxes are analyzed using the `wave-particle non-dualistic interpretation of quantum mechanics at a single-quantum level' and are shown to be non-paradoxes within the quantum formalism. Then, the extended version of Wigner's friend thought experiment, proposed in a recent article titled, ``Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself '', Nature Communications {\bf 9}, 3711 (2018), by Frauchiger and Renner (FR) is considered. In quantum mechanics, it's well-known that, statistically observing a large number of identical quantum systems at some particular quantum state, which results in Born's probability, and merely inferring its presence in the same quantum state with the same probability yield distinct physical phenomena. If this fact is not taken care while interpreting any experimental outcomes, then FR type paradoxes pop up. ``What an astonishingly self-consistent the Quantum Theory is!' - is explicitly worked out in the case of FR gedankenexperiment. The present work shows the importance of single-quantum phenomenon for the non-paradoxical interpretation of statistically observed experimental outcomes.
Complementarity tells us we cannot know precisely the values of all the properties of a quantum object at the same time: the precise determination of one property implies that the value of some other (complementary) property is undefined. E.g.the precise knowledge of the position of a particle implies that its momentum is undefined. Here we show that a Schroedinger cat has a well defined value of a property that is complementary to its ``being dead or alive'' property. Then, thanks to complementarity, it has an undefined value of the property ``being dead or alive''. In other words, the cat paradox is explained through quantum complementarity: of its many complementary properties, any quantum system, such as a cat, can have a well defined value only of one at a time. Schroedinger's cat has a definite value of a property which is complementary to ``being dead or alive'', so it is neither dead nor alive. Figuratively one can say it is both dead and alive. While this interpretation only uses textbook concepts (the Copenhagen interpretation), apparently it has never explicitly appeared in the literature. We detail how to build an Arduino based simulation of Schroedinger's experiment based on these concepts for science outreach events.