arXiv subjects

James M Yearsley

Publications and source records attributed to James M Yearsley.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2019

Contextuality in Human Decision Making in the Presence of Direct Influences: A Comment on Basieva et al. (2019)

In a recent paper Basieva, Cervantes, Dzhafarov, and Khrennikov (2019) presented a series of experiments which they claimed show evidence for contextuality in human judgments. This was based on a set of modified Bell-like inequalities designed to rule out effects caused by signalling. In this comment we show that it is, however, possible to construct a non-contextual model which explains the experimental data via direct influences, which we take to mean that a measurement outcome has a (model-specific) causal dependence on other measurements. We trace the apparent inconsistency to a definition of signalling which does not account for all possible forms of direct influence. Further, we cast doubt on the idea that any experimental data in psychology could provide conclusive evidence for contextuality beyond that explainable by direct influence.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2011

Aspects of Time in Quantum Theory

We consider a number of aspects of the problem of defining time observables in quantum theory. Time observables are interesting quantities in quantum theory because they often cannot be associated with self-adjoint operators. Their definition therefore touches on foundational issues in quantum theory. Various operational approaches to defining time observables have been proposed in the past. Two of the most common are those based on pulsed measurements in the form of strings of projection operators and continuous measurements in the form of complex potentials. One of the major achievements of this thesis is to prove that these two operational approaches are equivalent. However operational approaches are somewhat unsatisfying by themselves. To provide a definition of time observables which is not linked to a particular measurement scheme we employ the decoherent, or consistent, histories approach to quantum theory. We focus on the arrival time, one particular example of a time observable, and we use the relationship between pulsed and continuous measurements to relate the decoherent histories approach to one based on complex potentials. This lets us compute the arrival time probability distribution in decoherent histories and we show that it agrees with semiclassical expectations in the right limit. We do this both for a free particle and for a particle coupled to an environment. Finally, we consider how the results discussed in this thesis relate to those derived by coupling a particle to a model clock. We show that for a general class of clock models the probabilities thus measured can be simply related to the ideal ones computed via decoherent histories.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2010

A review of the decoherent histories approach to the arrival time problem in quantum theory

We review recent progress in understanding the arrival time problem in quantum mechanics, from the point of view of the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory. We begin by discussing the arrival time problem, focussing in particular on the role of the probability current in the expected classical solution. After a brief introduction to decoherent histories we review the use of complex potentials in the construction of appropriate class operators. We then discuss the arrival time problem for a particle coupled to an environment, and review how the arrival time probability can be expressed in terms of a POVM in this case. We turn finally to the question of decoherence of the corresponding histories, and we show that this can be achieved for simple states in the case of a free particle, and for general states for a particle coupled to an environment.

quant-ph↗