Zeno's paradox in quantum cellular automata (Q1179048)

Zeno's paradox in its simplest version describes the behaviour of a quantum system which is repeatedly measured in short time intervals resulting in the freezing of the motion. As a consequence the interference between distinguished individual amplitudes disappear and this constitutes an irreversible process. This is sometimes described as a non-unitary collapse of the state vector. The authors simulate Zeno's paradox with a cellular automaton whose site is characterized by a complex amplitude \(c(x,t)\) with the evolution rule \[ c(x,t+1)=c(x,t)- iEc(x,t)+i\delta^*c(x+1,t)+ic\delta c(x-1,t) \] here \(\delta\) is a complex valued parameter, \(\delta^*\) is the complex conjugate of \(\delta\) and \(E\) is the energy of the system. The authors show that the degree of non-unitarity of the cellular automaton evolution and the frequency of consecutive measurements of cellular automaton states are operationally indistinguishable.