Post-inflationary boundary conditions are essential to the existence of our highly structured universe, and these can only come about through quantum mechanical state reductions - i.e., through measurements. The choice is between: An 'objective' measurement that allows reduction to occur independent of conscious observers, and an 'observer' based measurement that ties reduction to the existence of a conscious observer. It is shown in this paper that that choice cannot be determined empirically; so how we finally understand state reduction will be decided by the way that reduction is used in a wider (future) theoretical framework. Key Words: consciousness, decoherence, stochastic choice, wave collapse.
New rules are proposed to govern the collapse of a wave function during measurement. These rules apply with or without an observer in the system. They overcome an absurdity that was previous found when an objective state reduction is combined with an observer-based state reduction. Key Words: brain states, conscious observer, detector, measurement, florescent pulsing, probability current, state reduction, three-level atom, von Neumann, wave collapse.
We consider two straightforward rules that govern the stochastic choice in a single quantum mechanical event. They are shown to lead to absurd results if an objective state reduction is allowed to compete with an observer state reduction. Since the latter collapse is empirically verifiable, the existence of the former is thrown into question. Key Words: Born Interpretation, brain states, continuous observation, conscious observer, objective measurement, observer measurement, probability current, state reduction, wave collapse.
By imposing system-observer symmetry on the von Neumann description of measurement, it is shown that the quantum measurement problem is structurally equivalent to a familiar reverse-engineering problem: that of describing the behavior of an arbitrary physical device as algorithm instantiation. It is suggested that this problem can at best be given a relational solution.
Quantum correlation is a fundamental property which distinguishes quantum systems from classical ones, and it is also a fragile resource under projective measurement. Recently, it has been shown that a subsystem in entangled pairs can share nonlocality with multiple observers in sequence. Here we present a new steering scenario where both subsystems are accessible by multiple observers. And it is found that the two qubits in singlet state can be simultaneously steered by two sequential observers, respectively.
It is argued that Feynman's rules for evaluating probabilities, combined with von Neumann's principle of psycho-physical parallelism, help avoid inconsistencies, often associated with quantum theory. The former allows one to assign probabilities to entire sequences of hypothetical Observers' experiences, without mentioning the problem of wave function collapse.The latter limits the Observer's (e.g., Wigner's friend's) participation in a measurement to the changes produced in material objects,thus leaving his/her consciousness outside the picture.
Based on weak measurement technology, we propose the first three-observer dimension witness protocol in a prepare-and-measure setup. By applying the dimension witness inequality based on the quantum random access code and the nonlinear determinant value, we demonstrate that double classical dimension witness violation is achievable if we choose appropriate weak measurement parameters. Analysis of the results will shed new light on the interplay between the multi-observer quantum dimension witness and the weak measurement technology, which can also be applied in the generation of semi-device-in…
Recently, it has been shown that at most two observers (Bobs) can sequentially demonstrate bipartite nonlocality with a spatially separated single observer (Alice) invoking a scenario where an entangled system of two spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles are shared between a single Alice in one wing and several Bobs on the other wing, who act sequentially and independently of each other [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 250401 (2015)]. This has been probed through the quantum violations of CHSH inequality, i. e., when each observer performs two dichotomic measurements. In the present study we investigate how many…
What is the observer's role in quantum measurement? Obviously, observers prepare the apparatus, observe and interpret the measured results. Although the observer will have a certain influence on the measurement results by setting up the measuring apparatus, we don't believe human consciousness cause reducing of wave packet; also observers are certainly required to interpret the measured results with physical meanings. We believe observers build up their experience of the external world by playing games with nature, and then "decode" the nature based on their experiences. We propose a quantum d…
We consider the situation in which an observer internal to an isolated system wants to measure the total energy of the isolated system (this includes his own energy, that of the measuring device and clocks used, etc...). We show that he can do this in an arbitrarily short time, as measured by his own clock. This measurement is not subjected to a time-energy uncertainty relation. The properties of such measurements are discussed in detail with particular emphasis on the relation between the duration of the measurement as measured by internal clocks versus external clocks.
Multiple observers who independently harvest nonclassical correlations from a single physical system share the system's ability to enable quantum correlations. We show that any number of independent observers can share the preparation contextual outcome statistics enabled by state ensembles in quantum theory. Furthermore, we show that even in the presence of any amount of white noise, there exists quantum ensembles that enable such shared preparation contextuality. The findings are experimentally realised by applying sequential unsharp measurements to an optical qubit ensemble which reveals th…
We study sequential state discrimination measurements performed on the same qubit by subsequent observers. Specifically, we focus on the case when the observers perform a kind of a minimum-error type state discriminating measurement where the goal of the observers is to maximize their joint probability of successfully guessing the state that the qubit was initially prepared in. We call this the joint best guess strategy. In this scheme, Alice prepares a qubit in one of two possible states. The qubit is first sent to Bob, who measures it, and then on to Charlie, and so on to altogether N consec…
We investigate the trade-off between information gain and disturbance for a class of weak von Neumann measurements on spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles, and derive the unusual measurement pointer state that saturates this trade-off. We then consider the fundamental question of sharing the non-locality of a single particle of an entangled pair among multiple observers, and demonstrate that by exploiting the information gain disturbance trade-off, one can obtain an arbitrarily long sequence of consecutive and independent violations of the CHSH-Bell inequality.
We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are `classical' or `macroscopic' for example) and thus, since quantum theory can be expressed as a rational theory of probabilistic inference, the measurement problem is not a problem.
From the point of view of the information theory, a model of the collapse phenomena at the measurement of a spin 1/2 projection is developed. This model phenomenologically includes an observer. The model allows not only to determine the state of a system after the measurement but also to compute the state of the observer. The state of the observer is equivalent to the operator of a spin projection which the observer will measure at the next measurement.
We propose that the degree of freedom of measurement by quantum mechanical observers originates in the Goldstone mode of the spontaneously broken time reparametrization symmetry. Based on the classification of quantum states by their non-unitary temporal behavior as seen in the measurement processes, we describe the concepts of the quantum mechanical observers via the time reparametrization symmetry.
Violation of a Bell inequality certifies that the underlying state must be entangled in a device-independent way, although there may exist some entangled states which do not violate such an inequality. On the other hand, for every entangled state, it is possible to find a hermitian operator called entanglement witness that can detect entanglement through some local measurements in a device-dependent method. The methods are significantly fragile to lossy detectors. To avoid such difficulties, measurement-device-independent entanglement witness based on a semi-quantum nonlocal game was proposed …
In this paper we give a new way to quantify the folklore notion that quantum measurements bring a disturbance to the system being measured. We consider two observers who initially assign identical mixed-state density operators to a two-state quantum system. The question we address is to what extent one observer can, by measurement, increase the purity of his density operator without affecting the purity of the other observer's. If there were no restrictions on the first observer's measurements, then he could carry this out trivially by measuring the initial density operator's eigenbasis. If, h…
We analyse the wave function collapse as seem by two distinct observers (with identical detectors) in relative motion. Imposing that the measurement process demands information transfer from the system to the detectors, we note that although different observers will acquire different amount of information from their measurements due to correlations between spin and momentum variables, all of them will agree about the orthogonality of the outcomes, as defined by their own reference frame. So, in this sense, such a quantum mechanical postulate is observer invariant, however the effective efficie…
We propose to apply the Back and Forth Nudging (BFN) method used for geophysical data assimilations to estimate the initial state of a quantum system. We consider a cloud of atoms interacting with a magnetic field while a single observable is being continuously measured over time using homodyne detection. The BFN method relies on designing an observer forward and backwards in time. The state of the BFN observer is continuously updated by the measured data and tends to converge to the systems state. The proposed estimator seems to be globally asymptotically convergent when the system is observa…
Two observers, who share a pair of particles in an entangled mixed state, can use it to perform some non-bilocal measurement over another bipartite system. In particular, one can construct a specific game played by the observers against a coordinator, in which they can score better than a pair of observers who only share a classical communication channel.
Bell nonlocality plays a fundamental role in quantum theory. Numerous tests of the Bell inequality have been reported since the ground-breaking discovery of the Bell theorem.Up to now, however, most discussions of the Bell scenario have focused on a single pair of entangled particles distributed to only two separated observers. Recently, it has been shown surprisingly that multiple observers can share the nonlocality present in a single particle from an entangled pair using the method of weak measurements [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 114}, 250401 (2015)]. Here we report an observation of double CHSH…
I compare the role of the information in the classical and quantum dynamics by examining the relation between information flows in measurements and the ability of observers to reverse evolutions. I show that in the Newtonian dynamics reversibility is unaffected by the observer's retention of the information about the measurement outcome. By contrast -- even though quantum dynamics is unitary, hence, reversible -- reversing quantum evolution that led to a measurement becomes in principle impossible for an observer who keeps the record of its outcome. Thus, quantum irreversibility can result fro…
A goal of most interpretations of quantum mechanics is to avoid the apparent intrusion of the observer into the measurement process. Such intrusion is usually seen to arise because observation somehow selects a single actuality from among the many possibilities represented by the wavefunction. The issue is typically treated in terms of the mathematical formulation of the quantum theory. We attempt to address a different manifestation of the quantum measurement problem in a theory-neutral manner. With a version of the two-slit experiment, we demonstrate that an enigma arises directly from the r…
Coherent feedback control of quantum systems has demonstrable advantages over measurement-based control, but so far there has been little work done on coherent estimators and more specifically coherent observers. Coherent observers are input the coherent output of a specified quantum plant, and are designed such that some subset of the observer and plant's expectation values converge in the asymptotic limit. We previously developed a class of mean tracking (MT) observers for open harmonic oscillators that only converged in mean position and momentum; Here we develop a class of covariance matri…
Given an unknown state of a qudit that has already been measured optimally, can one still extract any information about the original unknown state? Clearly, after a maximally informative measurement, the state of the system `collapses' into a post-measurement state from which the {\em{same}} observer cannot obtain further information about the original state of the system. However, the system still encodes a significant amount of information about the original preparation for a second observer who is unaware of the actions of the first one. We study how a series of independent observers can ob…
We consider Bell tests involving bipartite states shared between three parties. We show that the simple inclusion of a third part may greatly simplify the measurement scenario (in terms of the number of measurement settings per part) and allows the identification of previously unknown nonlocal resources.
Several theories have been advanced recently which appear to offer a resolution to that portion of the measurement problem which previously dealt with a possible reduction of the state vector in a subjective fashion by the brain, mind or consciousness. It now appears, based on both biological and mathematical analysis, that collapse of the wave function always takes place in an objective fashion in the retinal rod-rhodopsin molecule, and that only measured information is ever presented to the brain, mind or consciousness for possible subjective analysis. The remaining portion of the measuremen…
Bipartite Bell inequalities can be simultaneously violated by two different pairs of observers when weak measurements and signaling is employed. Here we experimentally demonstrate the violation of two simultaneous CHSH inequalities by exploiting a two-photon polarization maximally entangled state. Our results demonstrate that large double violation is experimentally achievable. Our demonstration may have impact for Quantum Key Distribution or certification of Quantum Random Number generators based on weak measurements.
In an entanglement swapping scenario, if two sources sharing entangled states between three parties are independent, local correlations lead to a different kind of inequalities than the standard Bell inequalities, known as network local models. A highly demanding task is to find out a way to involve many players nontrivially in a quantum network since measurements, in general, disturb the system. To this end, we consider here a novel way of sharing network nonlocality when two observers initially share close to a maximally entangled states. We report that by employing unsharp measurements perf…
We give strong analytic and numerical evidence that, under mild measurement assumptions, two qubits cannot both be recycled to generate Bell nonlocality between multiple independent observers on each side. This is surprising, as under the same assumptions it is possible to recycle just one of the qubits an arbitrarily large number of times [P. J. Brown and R. Colbeck, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 090401 (2020)]. We derive corresponding 'one-sided monogamy relations' that rule out two-sided recycling for a wide range of parameters, based on a general tradeoff relation between the strengths and maximum…
The objectivity is a basic requirement for the measurements in the classical world, namely, different observers must reach a consensus on their measurement results, so that they believe that the object exists "objectively" since whoever measures it obtains the same result. We find that this simple requirement of objectivity indeed imposes an important constraint upon quantum measurements, i.e., if two or more observers could reach a consensus on their quantum measurement results, their measurement basis must be orthogonal vector sets. This naturally explains why quantum measurements are based …
We investigate quantum state discrimination with confidentiality. $N$ observers share a given quantum state belonging to a finite set of known states. The observers want to determine the state as accurately as possible and send a discrimination result to a receiver. However, the observers are not allowed to get any information about which state was given. $N-1$ or fewer observers might try to steal the information, but if $N$ observers coexist, the honest ones will keep the dishonest ones from doing anything wrong. Assume that the state set has a certain symmetry, or more precisely, is Abelian…
We investigate the scenario where spatially separated parties perform measurements in randomly chosen bases on an N-partite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. We show that without any alignment of the measurements, the observers will obtain correlations that violate a Bell inequality with a probability that rapidly approaches 1 as N increases and that this probability is robust against noise. We also prove that restricting these randomly chosen measurements to a plane perpendicular to a common direction will always generate correlations that violate some Bell inequality. Specifically, if each …
We present a prescription for obtaining Bell's inequalities for N>2 observers involving more than two alternative measurement settings. We give examples of some families of such inequalities. The inequalities are violated by certain classes of states for which all standard Bell's inequalities with two measurement settings per observer are satisfied.
The quantum Zeno paradox is fully resolved for purely indirect and incomplete measurements performed by the detectors outside the system. If the outside detectors are prepared to observe propagating signals of a decay event of an excited state in the core region, the survival probability of the state is not changed at all by the outside measurements, as long as the wavefunction of the signals does not have reflectional-wave contributions going back to the core by the outside detectors. The proof is independendent of the decay law of the survival probabilities. Just watching frequently from out…
Quantum theory allows for correlations between the outcomes of distant measurements that are inconsistent with any locally causal theory, as demonstrated by the violation of a Bell inequality. Typical demonstrations of these correlations require careful alignment between the measurements, which requires distant parties to share a reference frame. Here, we prove, following a numerical observation by Shadbolt et al., that if two parties share a Bell state and each party randomly chooses three orthogonal measurements, then the parties will always violate a Bell inequality. Furthermore, we prove t…
Quantum measurement and quantum operation theory is developed here by taking the relational properties among quantum systems, instead of the independent properties of a quantum system, as the most fundamental elements. By studying how the relational probability amplitude matrix is transformed and how mutual information is exchanged during measurement, we derive the formulation that is mathematically equivalent to the traditional quantum measurement theory. More importantly, the formulation results in significant conceptual consequences. We show that for a given quantum system, it is possible t…
Remote predictability of quantum measurement outcomes
University of Gdańsk（格但斯克大学）；Harish-Chandra Research Institute, A CI of Homi Bhabha National Institute（哈里什-钱德拉研究所，霍米·巴巴国立学院）；Universidad de Murcia（穆尔西亚大学）
According to our current conception of physics, any valid physical theory is supposed to describe the objective evolution of a unique external world. However, this condition is challenged by quantum theory, which suggests that physical systems should not always be understood as having objective properties which are simply revealed by measurement. Furthermore, as argued below, several other conceptual puzzles in the foundations of physics and related fields point to limitations of our current perspective and motivate the exploration of an alternative: to start with the first-person (the observe…
We consider a continuous measurement of a two-level system (double-dot) by weakly coupled detector (tunnel point contact nearby). While usual treatment leads to the gradual system decoherence due to the measurement, we show that the knowledge of the measurement result can restore the pure wavefunction at any time (this can be experimentally verified). The formalism allows to write a simple Langevin equation for the random evolution of the system density matrix which is reflected and caused by the stochastic detector output. Gradual wavefunction ``collapse'' and quantum Zeno effect are naturall…
We present a systematic and complementary study of quantum correlations near a black hole by considering the measurement-induced nonlocality (MIN). The quantum measure of interest is discussed on the same footing for the fermionic, bosonic and mixed fermion-boson modes in relation to the Hawking radiation. The obtained results show that in the infinite Hawking temperature limit, the physically accessible correlations does not vanish only in the fermionic case. However, the higher frequency modes can sustain correlations for the finite Hawking temperature, with mixed system being more sensitive…
Due to the absence of an external, classical time variable, the probabilistic predictions of covariant quantum theory are ambiguous when multiple measurements are considered. Here, we introduce an information theoretic framework to the covariant formalism, and use it to interpret the measurement process. We find that the time ordering of measurements emerges as an entropy relationship in the state of the observers, giving unique probabilities for multiple measurements. This approach suggests a new, fully self-contained probability interpretation for generally covariant quantum physics, which m…
This paper has been withdrawn by the author. In this short paper I present a new approach to the problem of measurement, based on the difference between language (reality) and meta-language (meta-reality). This way, it will be shown as the measurement is a meta-sentence on a real event. It is no longer necessary to split up the world into subject and object with a shifty boundary, but starting with an holistic event (the phenomenon) in which everything is entangled and make meta-assertion on this. This possible way out stops von Neumann's chain and explains the real meaning of the concept of m…
We propose a "Copenhagen interpretation" for spacetime noncommutativity. The goal is to be able to predict results of simple experiments involving signal propagation directly from commutation relations. A model predicting an energy dependence of the speed of photons of the order E/E_Planck is discussed in detail. Such effects can be detectable by the GLAST telescope, to be launched in 2006.
Bell's inequality was originally derived under the assumption that experimenters are free to select detector settings independently of any local "hidden variables" that might affect the outcomes of measurements on entangled particles. This assumption has come to be known as "measurement independence" (also referred to as "freedom of choice" or "settings independence"). For a two-setting, two-outcome Bell test, we derive modified Bell inequalities that relax measurement independence, for either or both observers, while remaining locally causal. We describe the loss of measurement independence f…
A physical approach to qualia and the emergence of conscious observers in qualia space
Center for Mathematical Analysis, Geometry and Dynamical Systems, Department of Mathematics, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon（数学分析与动力系统中心，数学系，技术高等学院，里斯本大学）
