Disclosing hidden information in the quantum Zeno effect: Pulsed measurement of the quantum time of arrival

Abstract

Repeated measurements of a quantum particle to check its presence in a region of space was proposed long ago [G. R. Allcock, Ann. Phys. {\bf 53}, 286 (1969)] as a natural way to determine the distribution of times of arrival at the orthogonal subspace, but the method was discarded because of the quantum Zeno effect: in the limit of very frequent measurements the wave function is reflected and remains in the original subspace. We show that by normalizing the small bits of arriving (removed) norm, an ideal time distribution emerges in correspondence with a classical local-kinetic-energy distribution.

5 pages, 4 figures, minor changes

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• Fault-Tolerant Quantum Dynamical Decoupling
• Tunneling time calculations for general finite wavepackets based on the presence time formalism
• Suppression of Zeno effect for distant detectors
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• Investigation of a quantum mechanical detector model for moving, spread-out particles
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Detection of a quantum particle on a lattice under repeated projective measurements
• Spin dynamics in a strongly driven system: very slow Rabi oscillations
• Quantum Dynamics under continuous projective measurements: non-Hermitian description and the continuous space limit
• Generalized relation between pulsed and continuous measurements in the quantum Zeno effect
• Time-of-arrival correlations
• Questioning the adequacy of certain quantum arrival-time distributions
• Quantum Dynamics with Stochastic Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
• Non-Hermitian and Zeno limit of quantum systems under rapid measurements
• Space-time-symmetric extension of quantum mechanics: Interpretation and arrival-time predictions
• Finite-size scalings in measurement-induced dynamical phase transition