Parity measurements, decoherence and spiky Wigner functions
Parity measurements, decoherence and spiky Wigner functions
Notwithstanding radical conceptual differences between classical and quantum mechanics, it is usually assumed that physical measurements concern observables common to both theories . Not so with the eigenvalues ($\pm 1$) of the parity operator. The effect of such a measurement on a mixture of even and odd states of the …