Testing Linearity of Quantum Theory with a Thermometer

摘要

Collapse models postulate that space is filled with a collapse noise field,inducing quantum Brownian motions which are dominant during the measurement,thus causing collapse of the wave function. An important manifestation ofcollapse noise field, if any, is thermal energy generation, thus disturbing thetemperature profile of a system. The experimental investigation ofcollapse-driven heating effect has provided, so far, the most promising test ofcollapse models against standard quantum theory. In this paper, we calculatethe collapse-driven heat generation for a three-dimensional multi-atomicBravais lattice, by solving stochastic Heisenberg equations. We perform ourcalculation for the mass-proportional Continuous Spontaneous Localizationcollapse model with non-white noise. We obtain the temperature distribution ofa sphere under stationary-state and insulated surface conditions. Ourcalculation suggests that multi-atomic crystals are the best candidate toinvestigate the collapse-driven heat generation effect. However, the exactquantification of effect highly depend on the value of cutoff in the collapsenoise spectrum.