Slowing the Decay of an Excited Atom by the Presence of a Detector

2007/02/14 by D. R. Fredkin, Fredkin, D. R., Amiram Ron +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0702140

arxiv created 2007/02/14 · openalex publication_date 2007/02/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The decay of an excited is shown to slow down in the presence of a photo detector. This is similar to the behavior of an atom in a mistuned cavity, and under the conditions of the quantum Zeno effect. No external perturbing field is applied to measure the survival probability of the unstable state.

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