Vorträge in der Woche 11.08.2025 bis 17.08.2025

Freitag, 15.08.2025: Schrödinger operators that model hard detection

Lawrence Frolov (Rutgers University)

Consider a non-relativistic quantum particle prepared in a compact region of physical space and suppose a detecting screen is placed along the boundary of this region. As an idealization let us assume that the detection process is irreversible, its mechanism independent of time, and that the screen remains unentangled with the particle until detection. Under these conditions Tumulka argued that the dynamics of the particle's wave function must be governed by a strongly continuous contraction semigroup which weakly solves the Schrödinger equation, then proposed modelling the detecting screen via an absorbing boundary condition. In this talk we rigorously prove his claim by demonstrating that every strongly continuous contraction semigroup which weakly solves the Schrödinger equation is generated by the placement of some (generalized) absorbing boundary condition along the detecting surface.