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Updated: Jul 30, 2026

Quantum State Engineering of Light with Continuous-wave Optical Parametric Oscillators
Published on: May 30, 2014
Towards quantum superpositions of a mirror: an exact open systems analysis
Angelo Bassi1, Emiliano Ippoliti, Stephen L Adler
1The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34014 Trieste, Italy. bassi@ictp.trieste.it
Abstract:
We analyze the recently proposed mirror superposition experiment of Marshall, Simon, Penrose, and Bouwmeester, assuming that the mirror's dynamics contains a nonunitary term of the Lindblad-type proportional to -[q,[q,rho]], with q the position operator for the center of mass of the mirror, and rho the statistical operator. We derive an exact formula for the fringe visibility for this system. We discuss the consequences of our result for tests of environmental decoherence and of collapse models. In particular, we find that with the conventional parameters for the continuous spontaneous localization model of state vector collapse, maintenance of coherence is expected to within an accuracy of at least 1 part in 10(8). Increasing the apparatus coupling to environmental decoherence may lead to observable modifications of the fringe visibility, with time dependence given by our exact result.
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