Makroskopizität mechanischer Quantensuperpositionen

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Klaus Hornberger
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Optik, Quantenoptik und Physik der Atome, Moleküle und Plasmen
• Förderung: Förderung von 2016 bis 2021
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 298796255

• Erstellungsjahr: 2020

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

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.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

• Collapse-induced Orientational Localization of Rigid Rotors. J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 34, C1-C7 (2017)
  B. Schrinski, B. A. Stickler, and K. Hornberger
  
• Sensing spontaneous collapse and decoherence with interfering Bose-Einstein condensates. Quantum Sci. Technol. 2, 044010 (2017)
  B. Schrinski, K. Hornberger, and S. Nimmrichter
  
• Rotational friction and diffusion of quantum rotors. Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 040401 (2018)
  B. A. Stickler, B. Schrinski, and K. Hornberger
  
• Assessing the macroscopicity of quantum mechanical superposition tests via hypothesis falsification. Dissertation, DuEPublico (2019)
  Björn Schrinski
  
• 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
  
• Quantum-classical hypothesis tests in macroscopic matter-wave interferometry
  B. Schrinski, S. Nimmrichter, and K. Hornberger