June 2023

The Wigner’s friend experiment is a thought experiment in which a so-called superobserver (Wigner) observes another observer (the friend) who has performed a quantum measurement on a physical system. In this setup Wigner treats the friend the system and potentially other degrees of freedom involved in the friend’s measurement as one joint quantum system. In general, Wigner’s measurement changes the internal record of the friend’s measurement result such that after the measurement by the superobserver the result stored in the observer’s memory register is no longer the same as the result the friend obtained at her measurement, i.e. before she was measured by Wigner. Here, we show that any awareness by the friend of such a change, which can be modeled by an additional memory register storing the information about the change, conflicts with the no-signaling condition in extended Wigner-friend scenarios.

A pair of interferometers can be coupled by allowing one path from each to overlap such that if the particles meet in this overlap region, they annihilate. It was shown by one of us over thirty years ago that such annihilation-coupled interferometers can exhibit apparently paradoxical behaviour. More recently, Bose et al. and Marletto and Vedral have considered a pair of interferometers that are phase-coupled (where the coupling is through gravitational interaction). In this case one path from each interferometer undergoes a phase-coupling interaction. We show that these phase-coupled interferometers exhibit the same apparent paradox as the annihilation-coupled interferometers, though in a curiously dual manner.

In physics, it is crucial to identify operational measurement procedures to give physical meaning to abstract quantities. There has been significant effort to define time operationally using quantum systems, but the same has not been achieved for space. Developing an operational procedure to obtain information about the location of a quantum system is particularly important for a theory combining general relativity and quantum theory, which cannot rest on the classical notion of spacetime. Here, we take a first step towards this goal, and introduce a model to describe an extended material quantum system working as a position measurement device. Such a “quantum ruler” is composed of N harmonically interacting dipoles and serves as a (quantum) reference system for the position of another quantum system. We show that we can define a quantum measurement procedure corresponding to the “superposition of positions”, and that by performing this measurement we can distinguish when the quantum system is in a coherent or incoherent superposition in the position basis. The model is fully relational, because the only meaningful variables are the relative positions between the ruler and the system, and the measurement is expressed in terms of an interaction between the measurement device and the measured system.