Martingale Projections and Quantum Decoherence

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hughston, Lane P., Mengütürk, Levent A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918321421549568
author Hughston, Lane P.
Mengütürk, Levent A.
author_facet Hughston, Lane P.
Mengütürk, Levent A.
contents We introduce so-called super/sub-martingale projections as a family of endomorphisms defined on unions of Polish spaces. Such projections allow us to identify martingales as collections of transformations that relate path-valued random variables to each other under conditional expectations. In this sense, super/sub-martingale projections are random functionals that (i) are boundedness preserving and (ii) satisfy a conditional expectation criterion similar to that of the classical martingale theory. As an application to the theory of open quantum systems, we prove (a) that any system-environment interaction that manifests a supermartingale projection on the density matrix gives rise to decoherence, and (b) that any system-environment interaction that manifests a submartingale projection gives rise an increase in Shannon-Wiener information. It follows (c) that martingale projections in an open quantum system give rise both to quantum decoherence and to information gain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19491
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Martingale Projections and Quantum Decoherence
Hughston, Lane P.
Mengütürk, Levent A.
Quantum Physics
Information Theory
Probability
We introduce so-called super/sub-martingale projections as a family of endomorphisms defined on unions of Polish spaces. Such projections allow us to identify martingales as collections of transformations that relate path-valued random variables to each other under conditional expectations. In this sense, super/sub-martingale projections are random functionals that (i) are boundedness preserving and (ii) satisfy a conditional expectation criterion similar to that of the classical martingale theory. As an application to the theory of open quantum systems, we prove (a) that any system-environment interaction that manifests a supermartingale projection on the density matrix gives rise to decoherence, and (b) that any system-environment interaction that manifests a submartingale projection gives rise an increase in Shannon-Wiener information. It follows (c) that martingale projections in an open quantum system give rise both to quantum decoherence and to information gain.
title Martingale Projections and Quantum Decoherence
topic Quantum Physics
Information Theory
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19491