Large violation of Leggett-Garg inequalities with coherent-state projectors for a harmonic oscillator and chiral scalar field

Abstract

We investigate violations of Leggett-Garg inequalities (LGIs) for a harmonic oscillator and a (1+1)-dimensional chiral scalar field with coherent-state projectors, which is equivalent to a heterodyne-type measurement scheme. For the harmonic oscillator, we found that the vacuum and thermal states violated the LGIs by evaluating the two-time quasi-probability distribution function. In particular, we demonstrate that the value of the two-time quasi-probability reaches -0.123 for a squeezed coherent-state projector, which is equivalent to 98% of the Lüders bound corresponding to the maximal violation of the LGIs. We also find a violation of the LGIs for the local mode of a quantum chiral scalar field by constructing a coherent-state projector similar to the harmonic oscillator case. In contrast to the harmonic oscillator, the periodicity in the time direction of the quasi-probability disappears, which is related to the existence of quantum entanglement between the local mode and its complementary degrees of freedom.

23 pages, 14 figures