Spontaneous collapse: A solution to the measurement problem and a source of the decay in mesonic systems

Author(s)
Kyrylo Simonov, Beatrix C. Hiesmayr
Abstract

Dynamical reduction models propose a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics: the collapse of the wave function becomes a physical process. We compute the predictions to decaying and flavor-oscillating neutral mesons for the two most promising collapse models, the QMUPL (quantum mechanics with universal position localization) model and the mass-proportional CSL (continuous spontaneous localization) model. Our results are showing (i) a strong sensitivity to the very assumptions of the noise field underlying those two collapse models and (ii) under particular assumptions the CSL case allows one even to recover the decay dynamics. This in turn allows one to predict the effective collapse rates solely based on the measured values for the oscillation (mass differences) and the measured values of the decay constants. The four types of neutral mesons (K meson, D meson, B-d meson, and B-s meson) lead surprisingly to ranges comparable to those put forward by Adler [J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40, 2935 (2007)] and Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber [Phys. Rev. D 34, 470 (1986)]. Our results show that these systems at high energies are very sensitive to possible modifications of the standard quantum theory, making them a very powerful laboratory to rule out certain collapse scenarios and study the detailed physical processes solving the measurement problem.

Organisation(s)
Particle Physics, Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information
Journal
Physical Review A
Volume
94
No. of pages
20
ISSN
1050-2947
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.052128
Publication date
11-2016
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103025 Quantum mechanics, 103034 Particle physics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/f23f6b37-6664-41f7-83fc-126f3332b932