Quantum Zeno effect explained! The naughty kid! Must Read.
2 minutes read
|Difficulty level: Easy|
“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”―
Do you remember, when you were a kid, your parents would scold you, or stare at you with big eyes and an angry face or even beat you if you were too naughty? Your parents thought it is important to do that to keep you in the right track so that you don’t go out of hand.
A quantum state acts in a similar fashion. When you make a measurement on a quantum state, it collapses to one of its eigenstates. Just like you used to collapse into a ‘nice-kid’ state (your eigenstate) after that scolding. For a small interval of time, you would stay in that particular eigenstate and if you were not scolded again you would go back to the original superposition state(the ‘naughty’ state). In other words, an unstable quantum system stays in the measured eigenstate for a short interval of time and after a sufficient amount of time, it goes back to the original state, which actually was a superposition state. If you scold (measure) frequently enough, it stays in that eigenstate ‘forever’. This effect is known as the Quantum Zeno effect. You cute little naughty kid! You never knew you had a Quantum behaviour when you were a kid. 😀👦
There is more to it. Guess what? If you don’t make a measurement frequent enough, it can enhance the going-out-of-hand i.e. going back to the original superposition state. This effect is known as Quantum Anti-Zeno effect.
The Quantum Zeno effect was introduced to the scientific community in 1977 by B Misra and ECG Sudarshan in this paper. Take a moment to feel proud if you are from India!
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Some people still exist with the quantum behaviour!
The superposition state stays in some🤭
Btw quite interesting 👍👍