Quantum measurements and equilibration: The emergence of objective outcomes via entropy maximization

Abstract

The measurement postulate of quantum theory stands in conflict with the laws of thermodynamics and has evoked debate regarding what actually constitutes a measurement. With the help of modern quantum statistical mechanics, we take the first step in formalizing the hypothesis that quantum measurements are driven by the natural tendency of closed systems to maximize entropy, a notion that we call the measurement-equilibration hypothesis. In this paradigm, we investigate how classical measurement outcomes can emerge within a purely unitary framework, and find that (1) the interactions used in standard measurement models fail to spontaneously encode information classically and (2) while ideal projective measurements are impossible, one can (for a given form of Hamiltonian) approximate them exponentially well as more physical systems are collected together into an “observer” system. We thus lay the groundwork for self-contained models of quantum measurement, proposing improvements to our simple scheme.