Entropy (Jan 2024)

Quantum State Reduction of General Initial States through Spontaneous Unitarity Violation

  • Aritro Mukherjee,
  • Srinivas Gotur,
  • Jelle Aalberts,
  • Rosa van den Ende,
  • Lotte Mertens,
  • Jasper van Wezel

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/e26020131
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 26, no. 2
p. 131

Abstract

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The inability of Schrödinger’s unitary time evolution to describe the measurement of a quantum state remains a central foundational problem. It was recently suggested that the unitarity of Schrödinger dynamics can be spontaneously broken, resulting in measurement as an emergent phenomenon in the thermodynamic limit. Here, we introduce a family of models for spontaneous unitarity violation that apply to generic initial superpositions over arbitrarily many states, using either single or multiple state-independent stochastic components. Crucially, we show that Born’s probability rule emerges spontaneously in all cases.

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