Particle mixing and the emergence of classicality: A spontaneous-collapse-model view

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous collapse models influence the decay dynamics of flavor-oscillating systems, linking quantum measurement issues to classicality emergence through noise field asymmetries.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of collapse models on decay processes in mesons and connects noise asymmetry to the emergence of classical behavior in quantum systems.

Findings

Collapse models induce decay dynamics in quantum systems.

Decay properties are linked to noise field asymmetry.

The work relates stochastic calculus choices to physical collapse mechanisms.

Abstract

Spontaneous collapse models aim to resolve the measurement problem in quantum mechanics by considering wave-function collapse as a physical process. We analyze how these models affect a decaying flavor-oscillating system whose evolution is governed by a phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. In turn, we apply two popular collapse models, the Quantum Mechanics with Universal Position Localization and the Continuous Spontaneous Localization models, to a neutral meson system. By using the equivalence between the approaches to the time evolution of decaying systems with a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian and a dissipator of the Lindblad form in an enlarged Hilbert space, we show that spontaneous collapse can induce the decay dynamics in both quantum state and master equations. Moreover, we show that the decay property of a flavor-oscillating system is intimately connected to the time (a)symmetry of the noise field underlying the collapse mechanism. This (a)symmetry, in turn, is related to the definition of the stochastic integral and can provide a physical intuition behind the It\=o-Stratonovich dilemma in stochastic calculus.