No Arabic abstract
We model ideal arrival-time measurements for free quantum particles and for particles subject to an external interaction by means of a narrow and weak absorbing potential. This approach is related to the operational approach of measuring the first photon emitted from a two-level atom illuminated by a laser. By operator-normalizing the resulting time-of-arrival distribution, a distribution is obtained which for freely moving particles not only recovers the axiomatically derived distribution of Kijowski for states with purely positive momenta but is also applicable to general momentum components. For particles interacting with a square barrier the mean arrival time and corresponding ``tunneling time obtained at the transmission side of the barrier becomes independent of the barrier width (Hartman effect) for arbitrarily wide barriers, i.e., without the transition to the ultra-opaque, classical-like regime dominated by wave packet components above the barrier.
Using the concept of crossing state and the formalism of second quantization, we propose a prescription for computing the density of arrivals of particles for multiparticle states, both in the free and the interacting case. The densities thus computed are positive, covariant in time for time independent hamiltonians, normalized to the total number of arrivals, and related to the flux. We investigate the behaviour of this prescriptions for bosons and fermions, finding boson enhancement and fermion depletion of arrivals.
For a quantum-mechanically spread-out particle we investigate a method for determining its arrival time at a specific location. The procedure is based on the emission of a first photon from a two-level system moving into a laser-illuminated region. The resulting temporal distribution is explicitly calculated for the one-dimensional case and compared with axiomatically proposed expressions. As a main result we show that by means of a deconvolution one obtains the well known quantum mechanical probability flux of the particle at the location as a limiting distribution.
Via the proper-time eigenstates (event states) instead of the proper-mass eigenstates (particle states), free-motion time-of-arrival theory for massive spin-1/2 particles is developed at the level of quantum field theory. The approach is based on a position-momentum dual formalism. Within the framework of field quantization, the total time-of-arrival is the sum of the single event-of-arrival contributions, and contains zero-point quantum fluctuations because the clocks under consideration follow the laws of quantum mechanics.
We discuss quantum Hall effect in the presence of arbitrary pair interactions between electrons. It is shown that irrespective of the interaction strength the Hall conductivity is given by the filling fraction of Landau levels averaged over the ground state of the system. This conclusion remains valid for both integer and fractional quantum Hall effect.
We provide an exact construction of interaction Hamiltonians on a one-dimensional lattice which grow as a polynomial multiplied by an exponential with the lattice site separation as a matrix product operator (MPO), a type of one-dimensional tensor network. We show that the bond dimension is $(k+3)$ for a polynomial of order $k$, independent of the system size and the number of particles. Our construction is manifestly translationally invariant, and so may be used in finite- or infinite-size variational matrix product state algorithms. Our results provide new insight into the correlation structure of many-body quantum operators, and may also be practical in simulations of many-body systems whose interactions are exponentially screened at large distances, but may have complex short-distance structure.