Institut Fresnel - UMR 7249
Ralph Willox
University of Tokyo
Samuel Colin
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas
Project Title
Quantum Rogue Waves as Emerging Quantum Events
Project Summary
There are many puzzling aspects of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. Light, for example, sometimes behaves as particles, other times as a wave, depending on what is being measured. The observer causes the collapse of the wave-function and this, together with the linearity of the Schrödinger wave equation, forms the core of the measurement problem. However, there are alternatives to standard quantum mechanics which are not plagued by the measurement problem. An example is collapse models, in which a quantum system is always described by a wave, but this wave does not always evolve according to a deterministic equation: it gets localized sporadically according to a stochastic process. We aim to explain this spontaneous localization of the wave thanks to a deterministic process similar to a rogue wave formation, which is a freak wave whose birth is best described by a non-linear wave equation. A good candidate for such program is a non-linear wave equation where the non-linear term has a gravitational origin. In this non-linear framework, we want to understand how these quantum rogue waves (as events) emerge from the wave-function, the relations between these events, and to propose experimental tests to falsify our model.
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