An effective toy model in $M_n(\mathbb{C})$ for selective measurements in quantum mechanics

Abstract

The non-selective and selective measurements of a self-adjoint observable $A$ 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 $A$. 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 or decoherence, which is known to be described by the linear, deterministic Lindblad equation. The second step is a process from the resulted decohered state to a 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.

13 pages, 2 figures

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