Conditions for Nondistortion Interrogation of Quantum System

Zheng-Wei Zhou, Xingxiang Zhou, Marc J. Feldman, Guang-Can Guo

Published 2001-03-17, updated 2002-10-29Version 3

Under some physical considerations, we present a universal formulation to study the possibility of localizing a quantum object in a given region without disturbing its unknown internal state. When the interaction between the object and probe wave function takes place only once, we prove the necessary and sufficient condition that the object's presence can be detected in an initial state preserving way. Meanwhile, a conditioned optimal interrogation probability is obtained.