Quantum mechanics has always challenged our everyday understanding of reality. In the quantum world, particles can exist in a superposition of states, meaning they can occupy multiple possible positions or configurations at the same time. Physicists describe these possibilities mathematically using a wavefunction.
That picture is very different from ordinary life, where an object appears to be in one place and one state at a time. To bridge that gap, standard quantum mechanics says that when a quantum system is measured or observed, its wavefunction collapses into a single definite outcome. Now, with support from the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, an international team of physicists has explored a more radical possibility.
Their work suggests that certain alternatives to standard quantum mechanics, known as quantum collapse models, could have surprising consequences for the nature of time itself and for the ultimate precision of clocks. The findings, published in Physical Review Research, also point to a possible new way to test these unconventional theories against standard quantum mechanics. "What we did was to take seriously the idea that collapse models may be linked to gravity," says Nicola Bortolotti, a PhD student at the Enrico Fermi Museum and Research Centre (CREF) in Rome, Italy, who led the study.
"And then we asked a very concrete question: What does this imply for time itself?" When Quantum States Collapse on Their Own Beginning in the 1980s, physicists developed models in which wavefunction collapse does not require a measuring device or an observer. Instead, collapse can happen spontaneously. That makes these ideas different from many interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Interpretations mainly offer different conceptual explanations for what quantum theory means, while typically producing the same experimental predictions as standard quantum mechanics. Quantum collapse models go further because they predict physical effects that could, at least in principle, be measured. Bortolotti and his colleagues examined two different collapse models.
The team included Catalina Curceanu, a member of FQxI and research director at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-LNF) in Frascati, Italy, Kristian Piscicchia, at CREF and INFN-LNF, Lajos Diósi, of the Wigner Research Center for Physics and Eötvös Loránd University, in Budapest, Hungary, and Simone Manti of INFN-LNF. One of the models was the Diósi-Penrose model (named after FQxI members Lajos Diósi and Sir Roger Penrose). It has long proposed that gravity may play a role in forcing quantum systems to collapse into definite states.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
