Relativistic field formulation of simultaneous quantum measurement

Abstract

The simultaneous measurement of Dirac field operators is formulated in analogy to the work of von Neumann and Arthurs-Kelly. Meter fields are coupled to the system field with a relativistically invariant bilinear interaction. Measurement of vacuum meter field expectation values provides for the simultaneous measurement of noncommuting system components. It is shown that two meter coupling allows for a simultaneous minimum in the variance of the subsequent meter measurements. A pseudoscalar self-interaction of the Dirac field is shown to allow simultaneous measurement of positive energy field operators with negative energy meters. The simultaneous measurement ofn noncommuting field operators is obtained by coupling the system ton fermionic fields. Also, in this paper the related concept of mutual simultaneous measurement is developed. This requires that any operators in the enlarged Hilbert space are measurable by the remaining fields as meters. System embedding into a larger Hilbert space results in added noise due to the zero point motion of the meter fields. By the negentropy principle of Brillouin, the added noise is equivalent to entropy. A criterion determining the interaction among fields is that the averaged added noise in the components of each quantum field is minimized. This criterion defines an optimum fermionic mass matrix through the determination of the entangling interaction.