Frequent observations accelerate decay: The anti-Zeno effect

Abstract

The quantum Zeno effect (QZE) is the striking prediction that the decay of any unstable quantum state can be inhibited by sufficiently frequent observations (measurements). The consensus opinion has upheld the QZE as a general feature of quantum mechanics, which should lead to the inhibition of any decay. The claim of QZE generality hinges on the assumption that successive observations can in principle be made at time intervals too short for the system to change appreciably. However, this assumption and the generality of the QZE have scarcely been investigated thus far. We have addressed these issues by showing that (i) the QZE is principally unattainable in radiative or radioactive decay, because the required measurement rates would cause the system to disintegrate; (ii) decay acceleration by frequent measurements (the anti-Zeno effect -- AZE) is much more ubiquitous than its inhibition. The AZE is shown to be observable as the enhancement of tunneling rates (e.g., for atoms trapped in ramped-up potentials or in current-swept Josephson junctions), fluorescence rates (e.g., for Rydberg atoms perturbed by noisy optical fields) and photon depolarization rates (in randomly modulated Pockels cells).

8 pages, 13 figures, 1 table; revised version. Submitted to Z. Naturforsch. A

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Universal dynamical control of quantum mechanical decay: Modulation of the coupling to the continuum
• Universal dynamical decoherence control of noisy single-and multi-qubit systems
• Universal Dynamical Control of Local Decoherence for Multipartite and Multilevel Systems
• Measurement of the neutron lifetime and inverse quantum Zeno effect
• Capturing non-exponential dynamics in the presence of two decay channels
• Multichannel decay law
• The self-energy of Friedrichs-Lee models and its application to bound states and resonances
• Interaction rates in cosmology: heavy particle production and scattering
• Leggett-Garg inequalities and decays of unstable systems
• Observation of the Quantum Zeno Effect on a NISQ Device