Uncollapsing a wavefunction (demo in low temp cond matter lab)

marcus
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Uncollapse of a partial-collapsed quantum state has been accomplished in the laboratory. Here is a popular article

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20080706233709data_trunc_sys.shtml

An article on this by Nadav Katz et al has just appeared in Nature News. I believe this is the preprint of the article:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3547
Uncollapsing of a quantum state in a superconducting phase qubit
Nadav Katz, Matthew Neeley, M. Ansmann, Radoslaw C. Bialczak, M. Hofheinz, Erik Lucero, A. O'Connell, H. Wang, A. N. Cleland, John M. Martinis, Alexander N. Korotkov
4 pages, 4 figures
(Submitted on 22 Jun 2008)

"We demonstrate in a superconducting qubit the conditional recovery ('uncollapsing') of a quantum state after a partial-collapse measurement. A weak measurement extracts information and results in a non-unitary transformation of the qubit state. However, by adding a rotation and a second partial measurement with the same strength, we erase the extracted information, effectively canceling the effect of both measurements. The fidelity of the state recovery is measured using quantum process tomography and found to be above 70% for partial-collapse strength less than 0.6."

There were were theory papers 2007 and earlier about the theoretical possibility, like this one by Jordan and Korotkov:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.0365
Uncollapsing the wavefunction

but that was theory so still needed experimental demonstration.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
marcus said:
Here's another popular article about it:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080806140128.htm

I think it may be a first----uncollapsing a wavefunction.
Making a measurement and then unmaking it. Comment?
Does the experimental result conform with your conception of quantum mechanics?

Thanks for these articles - very interesting.
Uncollapsing a wave function? The obvious question here is what
would happen in the case of an entangled particle? i.e. would the collapse
and uncollapse be the same for the entangled particle light years away (it should be
because they are inseparable in the QM equation)?

If so, could we detect that the entangled partner was decollapsed too?
(would be at FLT?)
 
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If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!
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