Observing a Changing Hilbert-Space Inner Product

DOI10.1103/PHYSREVRESEARCH.4.013016MaRDI QIDQ6357342zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Salini Karuvade, Abhijeet Alase, Barry C. Sanders

Publication date 31 December 2020

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVRESEARCH.4.013016

Abstract: In quantum mechanics, physical states are represented by rays in Hilbert space $mathscrH$, which is a vector space imbued by an inner product $langle,|,angle$, whose physical meaning arises as the overlap $langlephi|psiangle$ for $|psiangle$ a pure state (description of preparation) and $langlephi|$ a projective measurement. However, current quantum theory does not formally address the consequences of a changing inner product during the interval between preparation and measurement. We establish a theoretical framework for such a changing inner product, which we show is consistent with standard quantum mechanics. Furthermore, we show that this change is described by a quantum channel, which is tomographically observable, and we elucidate how our result is strongly related to the exploding topic of PT-symmetric quantum mechanics. We explain how to realize experimentally a changing inner product for a qubit in terms of a qutrit protocol with a unitary channel.

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