Speaker
Prof.
John Ralston
(University of Kansas)
Description
{\it Quantum tomography} is a model-independent approach to characterizing quantum mechanical systems. Recent research in nuclear and particle physics has led to confronting issues of coherence and entanglement, that were sometimes suppressed, or sometimes implemented with models. The classic example is the parton model replacing quantum mechanical formalism by classical probabilistic proxies. Quantum tomography bypasses models and structure functions by extracting a density matrix describing the unknown system by using a known density matrix as a probe. While the notion of using a ``probe'' to explore an unknown system appears everywhere, the only true realization in quantum mechanics is quantum tomography. We illustrate a practical realization of quantum tomography that goes directly from momentum 4-vectors to quantum mechanical matrix elements. Applications to experiment have found unexpected new phenomena in every case explored so far.
Primary author
Prof.
John Ralston
(University of Kansas)
Co-author
Dr
Daniel Tapia Takaki
(University of Kansas)
