Macroscopicity of mechanical quantum superpositions
Final Report Abstract
Within this project a universal scheme to assess the macroscopicity of experimentally demonstrated quantum superposition states was developed and verified, using an uninformative approach to Bayesian hypothesis testing. By assessing the degree of falsification of a generic class of macrorealist modifications of quantum mechanics, the measure treats all experiments on equal footing, regardless the actual form and size of the empirical data. The versatility of this scheme was illustrated by applying it to state-of-theart quantum tests. This required a realistic, non-phenomenological description of the experiments including environmental decoherence effects. In this regard, the generic quantum Brownian motion master equation for the orientational degrees of freedom of nanoparticles was derived, which describes decoherence, diffusion, friction, and thermalization in the orientation dynamics. Along with the formulation of minimal modifications of quantum mechanics applied to orientational degrees of freedom this enabled a description of proposed superposition experiments with levitated nanorotors and the assessment of the respective macroscopicity.
Publications
- Collapse-induced Orientational Localization of Rigid Rotors. J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 34, C1-C7 (2017)
B. Schrinski, B. A. Stickler, and K. Hornberger
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1364/JOSAB.34.0000C1) - Sensing spontaneous collapse and decoherence with interfering Bose-Einstein condensates. Quantum Sci. Technol. 2, 044010 (2017)
B. Schrinski, K. Hornberger, and S. Nimmrichter
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-9565/aa8682) - Rotational friction and diffusion of quantum rotors. Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 040401 (2018)
B. A. Stickler, B. Schrinski, and K. Hornberger
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.040401) - Assessing the macroscopicity of quantum mechanical superposition tests via hypothesis falsification. Dissertation, DuEPublico (2019)
Björn Schrinski
(See online at https://doi.org/10.17185/duepublico/70585) - Macroscopicity of quantum mechanical superposition tests via hypothesis falsification. Phys. Rev. A 100, 032111 (2019)
B. Schrinski, S. Nimmrichter, B. A. Stickler, and K. Hornberger
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.100.032111) - Quantum-classical hypothesis tests in macroscopic matter-wave interferometry
B. Schrinski, S. Nimmrichter, and K. Hornberger
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.033034)
