Vecsernyés Péter (Wigner RMI): An effective toy model in $M_n(C)$ for selective measurements in quantum mechanics
→
Europe/Budapest
Tanacsterem
Tanacsterem
Description
The non-selective and selective measurements of a self-adjoint observable $M$ in quantum mechanics are interpreted as `jumps' of the state of the measured system into a decohered or pure state, respectively, characterized by the spectral projections of $M$. However, one may try to describe the measurement results as asymptotic states of a dynamical process, where the non-unitarity of time evolution arises as an effective description of the interaction of the measured system with the measuring device.
The dynamics we present is a two-step dynamics: the first step is the non-selective measurement of $M$ or $M$-decoherence, which is known to be described by the linear, deterministic Lindblad equation. The second step is a process from the resulted $M$-decohered state to an $M$-pure state, which is described by an effective non-linear `randomly chosen' toy model dynamics: the pure states arise as asymptotic fixed points, and their emergent probabilities are the relative volumes of their attractor regions.
