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A Quantum Field Theory View of Interaction Free Measurements

Foundations of Physics volume 50, pages 764–771 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

We propose a Quantum Field Theory description of beams on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer and apply the method to describe Interaction Free Measurements (IFMs), concluding that there is a change of momentum of the fields in IFMs. Analysing the factors involved in the probability of emission of low-energy photons, we argue that they do not yield meaningful contributions to the probabilities of the IFMs.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Notice that if the detonation is detectable, these photons cannot be soft as soft photons have, by definition, such low energy that they evade detection. To avoid this semantic confusion, we shall refer to the detectable photons as low-energy photons.

  2. The 4-momentum operator is

    $$P^{\mu } = \int_\Sigma {T^{{0\mu }} d^{3} x} ,$$
    (6)

    where \(T^{\nu \mu }\) is the energy-momentum tensor [14].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 1021/1055, 4169-007, Porto, Portugal

    Filipe C. R. Barroso & Orfeu Bertolami

  2. Centro de Física do Porto, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 1021/1055, 4169-007, Porto, Portugal

    Orfeu Bertolami

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  1. Filipe C. R. Barroso
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  2. Orfeu Bertolami
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Correspondence to Orfeu Bertolami.

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C. R. Barroso, F., Bertolami, O. A Quantum Field Theory View of Interaction Free Measurements. Found Phys 50, 764–771 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-020-00350-8

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Keywords

  • Interaction free measurements
  • Weinberg’s soft photon theorem