Recently the article "Tricking the Uncertainty Principle" speaks about the team in Caltech they try to do that. The original paper was "Mechanically Detecting and Avoiding the Quantum Fluctuations of a Microwave Field." I am interested in hearing an opinion of a quantum mechanic expert about this claim. In addition other researcher claim same Research team challenges the limits of famous quantum principle see. The study was published in January in the journal Physical Review Letters. Experimental Joint Quantum Measurements with Minimum Uncertainty.
Hello Arash,
good question!
My 2 cents:
i) Basically, Heisenberg's uncertainty relations represent just a mathematical property of the stationary (time-Independent) Schrödinger equation.
ii) When physics emigrated from Germany to the USA, the US-American pragmatism transformed these relations to Heisenberg's uncertainty "principle". (after Grossmann, one of the discoverers of the top quark)
iii) According to quantum logics, quantum mechanics describes the outcomes of the measurements of quantum systems using quantum methods/means.
Would have to look at that paper...
Peter
thanks peter, for example in Caltech team as you mention in pragmatic way they try decrease of error in measurement less than "uncertainty principle" fundamental limits. but when i see for example used 2 different microwave wave length in addition to simulation and etc. to increase precision. but in my opinion it should increase the error by increasing complexity of system and measurement in contrast of the conclusion. for example the error in wavelength and other physical property. what is your opinion i enjoy you and other follower participate to this matter that can be very interested topic. for me it is something more,i have some philosophical nostalgia to Uncertainty principle.
First, the uncertainty principle refers to the information you can get out of an arbitrary quantum mechanical state (without reference to any kind of Schroedinger equation). If you measure posiiton, say, in a given state, you will get various answers, distributed with a probability P_1(x). Similarly, if you perform a momentum measurement in the same state, you get results distributed with the probabiliy P_2(p). Then the variance of x multipled by the variance of p are greater than a fixed constant.
The issue of simultaneoulsy measuring p and q is a bit more complex, because standard quantum mechanics does not give unambiguous meaning to such a procedure. In other words, any experimental procedure you come up with would be intepreted by quantum emchanics as something else than a simultaneous measurement of position and momentum. However, to the extent new definitions allow to give some kind of meaning to such simultaneous measurements, the uncertainty rule still applies.
Finally, what does the paper do? The paper itself, if you read it, makes no mention of the uncertainty principle. Rather, it says that it aims to provide a measure of position alone in an oscillator, to an accuracy higher than the so-called Standard Quantum Limit. This is an issue involving usual techniques of measuring p and q, compared to less standard ones. In the usual techniques, position and momentum have, in some sense, comparable errors, so Heisenberg's principle actually imposes a limit on position uncertainty. But Back Action Avoidance or Quantum Non demolition techniques, which are what the paper is about, allow to circumvent these problems, *without* violating the uncertinty principle.
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