This Festschrift in honour of J. A. de Azcarraga gives an introduction to the concept of duality, i.e., to the relativity of the notion of a quantum, in the context of the quantum mechanics of a finite number of degrees of freedom. Although the concept of duality arises in string and M--theory, Vafa has argued that it should also have a counterpart in quantum mechanics, before moving on to second quantisation, fields, strings and branes. We illustrate our analysis with the case when classical phase space is complex projective space, but our conclusions can be generalised to other complex, symplectic phase spaces, both compact and noncompact.
Supersymmetry applied to quantum mechanics has given new insights in various topics of theoretical physics like analytically solvable potentials, WKB approximation or KdV solitons. Duality plays a central role in many supersymmetric theories such as Yang-Mills theories or strings models. We investigate the possible existence of some duality within supersymmetric quantum mechanics.
We calculate a tunneling time distribution by means of Nelson's quantum mechanics and investigate its statistical properties. The relationship between the average and deviation of tunneling time suggests the exsistence of ``wave-particle duality'' in the tunneling phenomena.
We identify a class of point-particle models that exhibit a target-space duality. This duality arises from a construction based on supersymmetric quantum mechanics with a non-vanishing central charge. Motivated by analogies to string theory, we are led to speculate regarding mechanisms for restricting the background geometry.
The wave particle duality, while being supported by overwhelming scientific evidence, is now claimed outdated by some physics professionals. They declare that the Quantum Field Theory allows only field aspect of reality. Presented below are the arguments showing that the Quantum Field Theory embraces the whole range of the Field-Particle Duality with both its extremes. We also discuss the important new experiments which reinforce the particle side of the story and thereby confirm the Field-Particle Duality. Key words: Fields, Particles, Reconfiguration, Quantum Nonlocality.
We formulate a relation between quantum-mechanical coherent states and complex-differentiable structures on the classical phase space ${\cal C}$ of a finite number of degrees of freedom. Locally-defined coherent states parametrised by the points of ${\cal C}$ exist when there is an almost complex structure on ${\cal C}$. When ${\cal C}$ admits a complex structure, such coherent states are globally defined on ${\cal C}$. The picture of quantum mechanics that emerges allows to implement duality transformations.
A duality between an electrostatic problem in a three dimensional world and a quantum mechanical problem in a one dimensional world which allows one to obtain the ground state solution of the Schrödinger equation by using electrostatic results is generalized to three dimensions. Here, it is demonstrated that the same transformation technique is also applicable to the s-wave Schrödinger equation in three dimensions for central potentials. This approach leads to a general relationship between the electrostatic potential and the s-wave function and the electric energy density to the quantum mecha…
The Liquid Drop Models (LDM) and the Independent Particle Models (IPM) have been known to provide two conflicting pictures of the nucleus. The IPM being quantum mechanical, is believed to provide a fundamental picture of the nucleus and hence has been focus of the still elusive unified theory of the nucleus. It is believed that the LDM at best is an effective and limited model of the nucleus. Here, through a comprehensive study of one nucleon separation energy, we give convincing evidence that actually the LDM is as fundamental and as basic for the description of the nucleus as the IPM is. As …
The Hamilton-Jacobi equation of relativistic quantum mechanics is revisited. The equation is shown to permit solutions in the form of breathers (oscillating/spinning solitons), displaying simultaneous particle-like and wave-like behaviour.
The geometry of the classical phase space C of a finite number of degrees of freedom determines the possible duality symmetries of the corresponding quantum mechanics. Under duality we understand the relativity of the notion of a quantum with respect to an observer on C. We illustrate this property explicitly in the case when classical phase space is complex n-dimensional projective space. We also provide some examples of classical dynamics that exhibit these properties at the quantum level.
I explore several related routes to deriving the Jordan-algebraic structure of finite-dimensional quantum theory from more transparent operational or physical principles, mainly involving ideas about the symmetries of, and the correlations between, probabilistic models. The key tool is the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem, which identifies formally real Jordan algebras with finite-dimensional order-unit spaces having homogeneous, self-dual cones.
The Schrödinger's wave function can naturally be realized as an 'instantaneous resonant spatial mode' in which quantum particle moves and hence the Born's rule is derived after identifying its origin. This realization facilitates the visualization of `what's really going on?' in the Young's double-slit experiment which is known to be the central mystery of quantum mechanics. Also, an actual mechanism underlying the `spooky-action-at-a-distance', another mystery regarding the entangled quantum particles, is revealed. Wheeler's delayed choice experiments, delayed choice quantum eraser experiment…
Effects of noncommutativity are investigated in planar quantum mechanics in the coordinate representation. Generally these issues are addressed by converting to the momentum space. In the first part of the work we show noncommutative effects in a Gaussian wavepacket through the broadening of its width. We also rederive results on *-product of Gaussian wavepackets. In the second part, we construct a "Master" model for a noncommutative harmonic oscillator by embedding it in an extended space. Different gauge choices leading to different forms of noncommutativity, (such as between coordinates onl…
Time-frequency duality, which enables control of optical waveforms by manipulating amplitudes and phases of electromagnetic fields, plays a pivotal role in a wide range of modern optics. The conventional one-dimensional (1D) time-frequency duality has been successfully applied to characterize the behavior of classical light, such as ultrafast optical pulses from a laser. However, the 1D treatment is not enough to characterize quantum mechanical correlations in the time-frequency behavior of multiple photons, such as the biphotons from parametric down conversion. The two-dimensional treatment i…
We study systems with parity invariant contact interactions in one dimension. The model analyzed is the simplest nontrivial one --- a quantum wire with a point defect --- and yet is shown to exhibit exotic phenomena, such as strong vs weak coupling duality and spiral anholonomy in the spectral flow. The structure underlying these phenomena is SU(2), which arises as accidental symmetry for a particular class of interactions.
The interest in studying quantum mechanics is always increasing in our society and schools. Especially in the latter case, this leads researchers to implement suitable actions to meet social needs of knowledge of quantum physics. We present an online laboratory on wave-particle duality for high school students (17-19 years old). The activity has been carried out in the period December 2021 - May 2022 at the Physics Department of the University of Cagliari and more than 100 students from different high schools in Sardinia have been involved. We will show the design of the activity and the exper…
In this paper we construct generalizations to spheres of the well known Levi-Civita, Kustaanheimo-Steifel and Hurwitz regularizing transformations in Euclidean spaces of dimensions 2, 3 and 5. The corresponding classical and quantum mechanical analogues of the Kepler-Coulomb problem on these spheres are discussed.
In this paper, we firstly briefly review the duality quantum computer. Distinctly, the generalized quantum gates, the basic evolution operators in a duality quantum computer are no longer unitary, and they can be expressed in terms of linear combinations of unitary operators. All linear bounded operators can be realized in a duality quantum computer, and unitary operators are just the extreme points of the set of generalized quantum gates. A d-slits duality quantum computer can be realized in an ordinary quantum computer with an additional qudit using the duality quantum computing mode. Dualit…
The Newton--Hooke duality and its generalization to arbitrary power laws in classical, semiclassical and quantum mechanics are discussed. We pursue a view that the power-law duality is a symmetry of the action under a set of duality operations. The power dual symmetry is defined by invariance and reciprocity of the action in the form of Hamilton's characteristic function. We find that the power-law duality is basically a classical notion and breaks down at the level of angular quantization. We propose an ad hoc procedure to preserve the dual symmetry in quantum mechanics. The energy-coupling e…
Quantum computer possesses quantum parallelism and offers great computing power over classical computer \cite{er1,er2}. As is well-know, a moving quantum object passing through a double-slit exhibits particle wave duality. A quantum computer is static and lacks this duality property. The recently proposed duality computer has exploited this particle wave duality property, and it may offer additional computing power \cite{r1}. Simply put it, a duality computer is a moving quantum computer passing through a double-slit. A duality computer offers the capability to perform separate operations on t…
The classical mechanics of a finite number of degrees of freedom requires a symplectic structure on phase space C, but it is independent of any complex structure. On the contrary, the quantum theory is intimately linked with the choice of a complex structure on C. When the latter is a complex-analytic manifold admitting just one complex structure, there is a unique quantisation whose classical limit is C. Then the notion of coherence is the same for all observers. However, when C admits two or more nonbiholomorphic complex structures, there is one different quantisation per different complex s…
Wave-particle duality is a bizarre feature at the heart of quantum mechanics which refers to the mutually exclusive dual attributes of quantum objects as the wave and the particle. Quantum eraser presents a counterintuitive aspect of the wave-particle duality. In this work, we show that quantum eraser can be quantitatively understood in terms of the recently developed duality--entanglement relation. In other words, we show that wave-particle-entanglement triality captures all the physics of the quantum erasure. We find that a controllable partial erasure of the which-path information is attain…
In this paper a one to one correspondence is established between space-time metrics of general relativity and the wave equations of quantum mechanics. This is done by first taking the square root of the metric associated with a space and from there, passing directly to a corresponding expression in the dual space. It is shown that in the case of a massless particle, Maxwell's equation for a photon follows while in the case of a particle with mass, Dirac's equation results as a first approximation. Moreover, this one to one correspondence suggests a natural explanation of wave-particle duality.…
In this paper, we show that the quantum bound state problems are mapped to $N$ point vortices with the identical circulation or strength using the Steiljes electrostatic model with imaginary charges. We also show that these $N$ point charges or vortices, become imaginary, in a constant background field will admit a wave solution under paraxial wave approximation. Therefore, in quantum mechanics as long as paraxial approximation is valid it behaves like a wave.
The wave-particle duality demonstrates a competition relation between wave and particle behavior for a particle going through an interferometer. This duality can be formulated as an inequality, which upper bounds the sum of interference visibility and path information. However, if the particle is entangled with a quantum memory, then the bound may decrease. Here, we find the duality relation between coherence and path information for a particle going through a multipath interferometer in the presence of a quantum memory, offering an upper bound on the duality relation which is directly connect…
Two quantum information processing protocols are said to be dual under resource reversal if the resources consumed (generated) in one protocol are generated (consumed) in the other. Previously known examples include the duality between entanglement concentration and dilution, and the duality between coherent versions of teleportation and super-dense coding. A quantum feedback channel is an isometry from a system belonging to Alice to a system shared between Alice and Bob. We show that such a resource may be reversibly decomposed into a perfect quantum channel and pure entanglement, generalizin…
Channel-state duality is a central result in quantum information science. It refers to the correspondence between a dynamical process (quantum channel) and a static quantum state in an enlarged Hilbert space. Since the corresponding dual state is generally mixed, it is described by a Hermitian matrix. In this article, we present a randomized channel-state duality. In other words, a quantum channel is represented by a collection of $N$ pure quantum states that are produced from a random source. The accuracy of this randomized duality relation is given by $1/N$, with regard to an appropriate dis…
We explore the hydrodynamic analogues of quantum wave-particle duality in the context of a bouncing droplet system which we model in such a way as to promote comparisons to the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics. Through numerical means we obtain single-slit diffraction and double-slit interference patterns that strongly resemble those reported in experiment and that reflect a striking resemblance to quantum diffraction and interference on a phenomenological level. We, however, identify evident differences from quantum mechanics which arise from the governing equations at the …
We investigate coherent backscattering of light by two harmonically trapped atoms in the light of quantitative quantum duality. Including recoil and Doppler shift close to an optical resonance, we calculate the interference visibility as well as the amount of which-path information, both for zero and finite temperature.
We derive a generalized wave-particle duality relation for arbitrary multipath quantum interference phenomena. Beyond the conventional notion of the wave nature of a quantum system, i.e., the interference fringe visibility, we introduce a quantifier as the normalized quantum coherence, recently defined in the framework of quantum information theory. To witness the particle nature, we quantify the path distinguishability or the which-path information based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination. Then, the Bohr complementarity principle for multipath quantum interference can be stated as a …
We discuss dual time evolution scenarios which, albeit running according to the same real time clock, in each considered case may be mapped among each other by means of an analytic continuation in time. This dynamical duality is a generic feature of diffusion-type processes. Technically that involves a familiar transformation from a non-Hermitian Fokker-Planck operator to the Hermitian operator (e.g. Schroedinger Hamiltonian), whose negative is known to generate a dynamical semigroup. Under suitable restrictions upon the generator, the semigroup admits an analytic continuation in time and ulti…
Until recently, wave-particle duality has been thought of as quantum principle without a counterpart in classical physics. This belief was challenged after (i) finding that average dynamics of a classical particle in strong inhomogeneous oscillating field resembles that of a quantum object and (ii) experimental discovery of "walkers" - macroscopic droplets that bounce on a vertically vibrating bath of the same fluid and can self-propell via interaction with the surface waves they generate. This paper exposes a new family of objects that can display both particle and wave features all together …
Using T-duality, we will argue that a zero point length exists in the low energy effective field theory of string theory on compactified extra dimensions. Furthermore, if we neglect the oscillator modes, this zero point length would modify low quantum mechanical systems. As this zero length is fixed geometrically, it is important to analyze how it modifies purely quantum mechanical effects. Thus, we will analyze its effects on quantum erasers, because they are based on quantum effects like entanglement. It will be observed that the behavior of these quantum erasers gets modified by this zero p…
The quantum-mechanical many-body system with the potential proportional to the pairwise inverse-square distance possesses a strong-weak coupling duality. Based on this duality, particle and/or quasiparticle states are described as SU(1,1) coherent states. The constructed quasiparticle states are of hierarchical nature.
The concept of duality reflects a link between two seemingly different physical objects. An example in quantum mechanics is a situation where the spectra (or their parts) of two Hamiltonians go into each other under a certain transformation. We term this phenomenon as the energy-spectrum reflection symmetry. We develop an approach to this class of problems, based on the global properties of the Riemann surface of the quantum momentum function, a natural quantum-mechanical analogue to the classical momentum. In contrast to the algebraic method, which we also briefly review, our treatment provid…
We study the Klein four-group $(K_4)$ symmetry of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation for the conformal mechanics model of de Alfaro-Fubini-Furlan (AFF) with confining harmonic potential and coupling constant $g=ν(ν+1)\geq -1/4$. We show that it undergoes a complete or partial (at half-integer $ν$) breaking on eigenstates of the system, and is the automorphism of the $\mathfrak{osp}(2,2)$ superconformal symmetry in super-extensions of the model by inducing a transformation between the exact and spontaneously broken phases of $\mathcal{N}=2$ Poincaré supersymmetry. We exploit the $K_4$ symm…
It is shown, using level-rank duality that a universal topological quantum computer based on Chern-Simons theory for SU(2)$_3$ also implies an analogous universal quantum computer based on SU(3)$_2$. Suggestions are made for the possible role of level-rank duality in entanglement from topology.
We show how to complement Feynman's exponential of the action so that it exhibits a Z_2 duality symmetry. The latter illustrates a relativity principle for the notion of quantum versus classical.
We put forward and prove a simple theorem stating that the eigenvalues of a tridiagonal matrix change their sign (as a set), once the signs of the diagonal elements of the matrix are changed. We also provide an example of application of this theorem in quantum physics. Specifically, we introduce the notion of duality and self-duality for a sextic-polynomial quasi-exactly-solvable potential, and demonstrate that the algebraic parts of the spectrum of the dual potentials have signs opposite to one another (as sets). Our Theorem furnishes an elegant one-line proof of this statement. In addition, …
In a predicative framework from basic logic, defined for a model of quantum parallelism by sequents, we characterize a class of first order domains, termed {\em virtual singletons}, which allows a generalization of the notion of duality, termed {\em symmetry}. Although consistent with the classical notion of duality, symmetry creates an environment where negation has fixed points, for which the direction of logical consequence is irrelevant. Symmetry can model Bell's states. So, despite its nonsense in a traditional logical setting, symmetry can hide the peculiar advantage for the treatment of…
Parallels between the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and the black hole information loss problem in quantum gravity are exhibited and then the attempted resolution of the latter in terms of the gauge/gravity duality is extended to the former.
We investigate the transformation of entanglement entropy under dualities, using the Kramers-Wannier duality present in the transverse field Ising model as our example. Entanglement entropy between local spin degrees of freedom is not generically preserved by the duality; instead, entangled states may be mapped to states with no local entanglement. To understand the fate of this entanglement, we consider two quantitative descriptions of degrees of freedom and their transformation under duality. The first involves Kraus operators implementing the partial trace as a quantum channel, while the se…
We study wave-particle duality by exploring for the first time effects of a quantum object's source. A single photon emitted from a pair of nonlocally entangled two-level atoms is specifically analyzed. Surprisingly, duality is found to be a conditional phenomenon depending on the photon's atomic source. It can be tuned maximum, medium, and even minimum (completely absent) by the atomic state purity through an exact quadratic relation that can be called Duality Pythagorean Theorem. The analysis shows a new way of investigating duality by accounting how the single quantum object is created. The…
We provide the first experimental confirmation of a three-way quantum coherence identity possessed by single pure-state photons. Our experimental results demonstrate that traditional wave-particle duality is specifically limited by this identity. As a new consequence, we show that quantum duality itself can be amplified, attenuated, or turned completely off. In the Young double-slit context this quantum coherence identity is found to be directly relevant, and it supplies a rare quantitative backup for one of Bohr's philosophical pronouncements.
Classically, the dynamics of the chiral oscillator (CO) may be described by the Landau model (LM) through a well established mathematical procedure known as duality mapping. In this letter we show how this duality is broken in quantum mechanics due to the presence of a $Z_2$-anomaly in the CO. We give the theoretical basis for an experimental setup displaying the possibility to measure this global anomaly using cold Rydberg atoms.
Looking for a quantum-mechanical implementation of duality, we formulate a relation between coherent states and complex-differentiable structures on classical phase space ${\cal C}$. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of locally-defined coherent states is the existence of an almost complex structure on ${\cal C}$. A necessary and sufficient condition for globally-defined coherent states is a complex structure on ${\cal C}$. The picture of quantum mechanics that emerges is conceptually close to that of a geometric manifold covered by local coordinate charts. Instead of the l…
We analyze the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics through the lens of the proposed ER=EPR (Einstein-Rosen = Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) duality between entanglement and wormholes. In particular, we find that the no-cloning theorem is dual on the gravity side to the no-go theorem for topology change, violating the axioms of which allows for wormhole stabilization and causality violation. Such a duality between important no-go theorems elucidates the proposed connection between spacetime geometry and quantum entanglement.
In this paper, we establish an interesting duality between two different quantum information-processing tasks, namely, classical source coding with quantum side information, and channel coding over c-q channels. The duality relates the optimal error exponents of these two tasks, generalizing the classical results of Ahlswede and Dueck. We establish duality both at the operational level and at the level of the entropic quantities characterizing these exponents. For the latter, the duality is given by an exact relation, whereas for the former, duality manifests itself in the following sense: an …
We develop a new operator algebraic formulation of the Nakajima-Mori-Zwanzig (NMZ) method of projections. The new theory is built upon rigorous mathematical foundations, and it can be applied to both classical and quantum systems. We show that a duality principle between the NMZ formulation in the space of observables and in the state space can be established, analogous to the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures in quantum mechanics. Based on this duality we prove that, under natural assumptions, the projection operators appearing in the NMZ equation must be conditional expectations. The propo…
