Quantum telegraph behavior without photons
Phys. Rev. A 113, 042208 – Published 7 April, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/t4rs-ncw8
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.
