# Quantum Telegraph Behavior Without Photons

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that telegraph switching in single qubits can be explained by a non-Hermitian noise model without invoking photons, supporting a continuous collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

## Contribution

It introduces a simple non-Hermitian noise model that reproduces telegraph behavior and adheres to the Born rule without requiring photon-based explanations.

## Key findings

- Reproduces telegraph switching behavior with a non-Hermitian noise model
- Supports continuous collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics
- Obeys Born rule for particle counting without particle assumptions

## Abstract

We show that a simple model of non-Hermitian noise gives rise to the telegraph switching behavior seen in experiments with single qubits, without any reference to the existence of photons as corpuscles. This lends support to a continuous collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics, but can also be viewed as a model of continuous detection of a steady-state process in the incoherent limit. We show explicitly that such a system obeys the Born rule for particle counting statistics, even though no particle behavior has been invoked at any point in the calculation.