Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Density matrix — where it appears

The description of a quantum state that covers mixtures as well as pure superpositions. It is the only description available when part of an entangled system is examined on its own, and summing it over a distant measurement's outcomes leaves it unchanged — which is the arithmetic behind entanglement carrying no signal.

Named by 5 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

What is lost is exactly what is recorded. Fringe visibility against the distinguishability of the record left in the environment, for six couplings between the interferometer and a marker. The points lie on the quarter circle V² + D² = 1, computed here to a part in 10¹² — the visibility from the output probabilities with the marker traced out, and the distinguishability from the overlap of the marker's two states, with nothing shared between the two calculations. The relation is the quantitative form of complementarity, and it is stronger than the usual statement: interference is not lost because something was disturbed, and not lost only when a measurement is made. It is lost exactly to the extent that the environment could in principle say which way the particle went, whether or not anybody looks at the environment. That is why decoherence is a matter of correlation rather than of disturbance: the coherence has not been destroyed but relocated, into a correlation between the particle and something else.

Where the interference goes

A superposition does not stop being a superposition when something interacts with it. What happens is that the coherence moves — out of the system and into a correlation between the system and its surroundings — and the interference disappears from any measurement made on the system alone. For a dust grain in air the move takes 10⁻²⁸ seconds, which is why nothing large has ever been seen in two places.

quantum · Measurement Three copiers, and what each of them costs. How well three copying machines reproduce a qubit, against the state's angle from the pole. The first is a linear machine built to copy the two pole states perfectly; linearity then fixes what it does everywhere else, and on an equal superposition it produces an entangled pair whose overlap with the two copies wanted is exactly 0.500. That is the no-cloning theorem written as a number rather than as an argument: no adjustment is available, because the machine's behaviour on superpositions was decided the moment its behaviour on the basis was. The second measures in a fixed basis and prepares two copies of what it found, which is perfect at the poles and averages 0.6667 over the sphere — two thirds, exactly. The third is the best machine there is, and it manages 0.8333 on every state alike: five sixths, and not one.

The state that cannot be copied

Every measurement in this collection disturbs what it measures, and the obvious way round that is to make a spare first. It cannot be done, and the reason is not a practical difficulty or a limit on how good an apparatus can be: a copier is a linear machine, so fixing what it does to two states fixes what it does to their superpositions, and what it then does is not a copy.

quantum · Measurement One measurement that separates unpolarised from polarised. What a rotating linear polariser passes, against its angle, for beams of the same total intensity and degrees of polarisation 0, 0.35, 0.7, 1. Every curve has the same average — a polariser passes half of any beam over a whole turn, whatever its state — and they differ only in how deeply they modulate. The depth of the modulation is the degree of polarisation, exactly: a fully polarised beam goes to zero at one angle and a beam with no preferred direction gives a flat line at a half. That is the whole measurement, and it is why "unpolarised" is a statement about a modulation depth rather than about what a wave is doing.

The light with no direction of shaking

Unpolarised light is not a state of a wave; it is the absence of one, and no description of a single wave can represent it. What can is a set of four numbers, all of them powers a detector reads — and they describe every beam there is, including the ones that are neither polarised nor not.

optics · Polarisation Two pairs, and only one of them may cheat. The CHSH value a party shares with a second, against the value the same party shares with a third. Every quantum state lies inside a quarter circle whose radius is Tsirelson's bound, 2.8284, because the sum of the two squared values cannot exceed eight. The classical limit is 2 on each axis, and the square that would hold both violations sticks out of the circle everywhere except at its corner: the best both can manage at once is exactly 1.999998, which is the classical value and no violation at all. So a party maximally entangled with one other is correlated with everybody else exactly as a classical object would be. Nothing about the measurement or the apparatus was assumed; this follows from the state alone.

What two have they cannot give a third

Entanglement will not be shared. A pair that violates a Bell inequality is correlated with everything else exactly as a classical object would be, and the trade is exact enough to be drawn: two CHSH values must fit inside a circle of radius 2√2.

quantum · Entanglement A quasi-probability that goes negative. The Wigner function of the oscillator's state at a quarter of its revival time, with 4 quanta on average: two copies of the packet, at x = ±2.83, in equal superposition. It is computed from the wavefunction by the Wigner transform on a lattice, and it integrates to one. The two copies are the two positive blobs. Between them lies a pattern of stripes with no classical counterpart, running from 0.289 down to −0.289, where the shaded warm regions and their outlines mark negative values. A negative probability is not a probability, so this distribution cannot describe a cloud of classical particles. The stripes are also taller than the blobs, so the interference carries more structure than the copies themselves: the highest stripe reaches 0.289 and the centre of a blob 0.159.

The probability that goes below zero

Classical mechanics describes an uncertain state as a cloud of points in the plane of position and momentum. Quantum mechanics has an exact counterpart, the Wigner function, whose shadows are the true position and momentum distributions — and which goes negative. It goes negative for a single photon, for every superposition of two packets, and for every pure state that is not a Gaussian. Where it is negative no classical cloud can imitate the state, and losing energy to the surroundings erases the negative regions first.

quantum · Correspondence

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

SuperpositionEntanglementMeasurementDecoherenceNo-cloningBell inequalityCircular polarisationClassical limitCoherenceCoherent stateComplementarityCorrelation

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