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Quantum Telegraph Behavior Without Photons
Truong-Son P. Van, Daniel Maienshein, David W. Snoke·August 28, 2025
Quantum Physics
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Abstract
We show that a simple model of non-Hermitian noise gives rise to the telegraph switching behavior seen in experiments with single qubits, without any reference to the existence of photons as corpuscles. This lends support to a continuous collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics, but can also be viewed as a model of continuous detection of a steady-state process in the incoherent limit. We show explicitly that such a system obeys the Born rule for particle counting statistics, even though no particle behavior has been invoked at any point in the calculation.