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A Theory of Quantum Jumps

Jürg Fröhlich, Zhou Gang, Alessandro Pizzo

16/4/24 Published in : arXiv:2404.10460

Using the principles of the ETH - Approach to Quantum Mechanics we study fluorescence and the phenomenon of ``quantum jumps'' in idealized models of atoms coupled to the quantized electromagnetic field. In a limiting regime where the orbital motion of the atoms is neglected and the velocity of light tends to infinity we derive explicit non-linear stochastic differential equations describing the effective time evolution of states of individual atoms. These equations give rise to a measure on state-trajectories with quantum jumps which is a quantum-mechanical analogue of the Wiener measure of Brownian motion. Our results amount to a derivation of the fundamental randomness in the quantum-mechanical description of microscopic systems from basic principles in the context of some simple models.

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Phase I & II research project(s)

  • Quantum Systems
  • Field Theory
  • Statistical Mechanics
  • Geometry, Topology and Physics

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  • Spectral gap problems in non-perturbative quantum theory
  • Quantum information and many body theory

Time-dependent microstrata in AdS3

Quantum Chaos on Edge

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