Negativity of the Coarse Grained Wigner Function as a Measure of Quantal Behavior

ORAL

Abstract

The negativity of a given state's Wigner function has been proposed as a measure of quantumness of that state in a unipartite system. This otherwise physically intuitive and useful phase-space measure however does not yield the right correspondence principle limit, and also turns out to yield infinite values of the infinite square well. We show that both these issues can be sensibly resolved using coarse-graining of the Wigner function.

Authors

  • Tyler Keating

    • Carleton College
  • Adam Steege

    • Carleton College and Columbia University
  • Arjendu Pattanayak

    • Carleton College