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Kai-Wen Wong

Publications and source records attributed to Kai-Wen Wong.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Forbidden Subspaces in Quantum State Smoothing

A system between a preparation and a post-selection has had no agreed state since 1964. With positivity as the criterion, a post-selection admits an interval of orderings around the symmetric one exactly when the subspace it forbids is spanned by eigenvectors of a full-rank filtered state. Otherwise it certifies contextuality, testable on a qubit. The averaged filtered state carries the entanglement spectrum of the record, so the smallest forbidden subspaces a symmetry allows are even-dimensional in the Haldane class and odd in the trivial one. That parity is the record's topological class.

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Nodal obstruction to conditioned-diffusion representations of the weak momentum

Quantum Schrödinger bridge constructions establish the existence of a conditioned process under a positivity hypothesis on the endpoint data, and three independent ones adopt it. We show that hypothesis fails on a definite locus once the conditioned object is the two-state amplitude $ϕ^*ψ$ of a pre- and post-selected pair on configuration space, and that the failure is testable on recorded data. Whenever $ϕ^*ψ$ has a moving zero of order $k$ across which probability flows, no diffusion of constant diffusion coefficient can both carry the conditioned density and avoid the nodal curve: the current velocity it would need grows as the inverse $2k$-th power of the distance to that curve and points toward it on one side, placing the curve at finite scale distance, so it is reached and not merely approached. Identifying the weak momentum with a bridge drift fails independently: for a free particle post-selected in position the current velocity is exactly minus the drift of the bridge to the target. The positive Doob $h$-transform and the Bernstein conditioning built on it exist wherever $ϕ^*ψ$ is nodeless and fail on the nodal curve. There the osmotic part of the weak momentum diverges as the inverse distance to the zero and changes sign across it with a coefficient set by $k$, while the current part stays bounded; that boundedness rests on the signed factorization of the real-envelope class and hides the obstruction from any picture built on the current velocity alone. A measured fringe visibility fixes a single length, which puts a Lorentzian of order $10^{-3}$ into the current channel reconstructed in the two-slit trajectory experiment if the contrast is limited by an off-axis zero, and nothing there if by incoherence. The results are one-dimensional, covering the separable transverse field of a two-slit geometry, not general two-dimensional vortices.

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Conditioning on the Future: A Filtration-Theoretic Formalization of Wheeler's Participatory Universe

Wheeler's delayed-choice experiments and the time-symmetric formalisms of quantum measurement have long fueled a debate over whether time symmetry in quantum theory entails retrocausality. We argue that the debate conflates two distinct structures, and that the framework for separating them is the classical theory of conditioning: Doob $h$-transforms, Markov bridges, and enlargement of filtrations on the probabilistic side, and the forward-state/backward-effect (two-state-vector) formalism of pre- and post-selected systems on the quantum side. We sharpen Wheeler's participatory universe, delayed choice, and ``It from Bit'' into three theses and build a correspondence dictionary that maps each to a precise statement in one or both formalisms. The dictionary is anchored by two structurally isomorphic results: an operational proposition that a future measurement choice sorts the past ensemble into subensembles without disturbing any earlier marginal, and its classical counterpart, the disintegration of an unconditioned law into future-conditioned bridges -- both a single fact: marginalizing over the final measurement leaves earlier marginals fixed, by completeness of the POVM together with trace preservation on the quantum side and by the tower property of conditional expectation on the classical. The conditional calculus is time-symmetric; its causal structure is not. Delayed choice is thereby a selection effect rather than retrocausation, and the apparent ``pull from the future'' is a bridge drift. We state explicitly what the framework does not do -- it neither derives the Born rule nor solves the measurement problem -- and delineate the legitimate scope of participatory language in quantum mechanics.

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