Measurements on the reality of the wavefunction

By Martin Ringbauer, Ben Duffus, Cyril Branciard, Eric Cavalcanti, A. White, Alessandro Fedrizzi. Nature Physics, 2014

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum mechanics is an outstandingly successful description of nature, underpinning fields from biology through chemistry to physics. At its heart is the quantum wavefunction, the central tool for describing quantum systems. Yet it is still unclear what the wavefunction actually is: does it merely represent our limited knowledge of a system, or is it in direct correspondence to reality? Recent no-go theorems argued that if there was any objective reality, then the wavefunction must be real. However, that conclusion relied on debatable assumptions. Here we follow a different approach without these assumptions and experimentally bound the degree to which knowledge interpretations can explain quantum phenomena. Using single photons, we find that no knowledge interpretation can fully explain the limited distinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states in three and four dimensions. Assuming that a notion of objective reality exists, our results thus strengthen the view that the wavefunction should directly correspond to this reality. Whether the wavefunction corresponds to reality or represents our limited knowledge of a quantum system is still under debate. A photonic experiment provides evidence for the former.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66db1b882821da5b971bd12b181b00b61976c40b

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Citations in the corpus

Is the Quantum State Real? An Extended Review of -ontology Theorems (2014, background): “rd’s results [55], a recent experiment with single photons has given a bound on the ratio of overlap to the quantum probability of 0:690 0:001 for a set of 10 states in a Hilbert space of dimension 4 [141]. This is still quite far from establishing the reality of the quantum state, for which one wou”