Wigner’s friend scenarios: On what to condition and how to verify the predictions
- Author(s)
- Flavio Del Santo, Gonzalo Manzano, Časlav Brukner
- Abstract
Wigner’s friend experiment and its modern extensions display the ambiguity of the quantum mechanical description regarding the assignment of quantum states. While the friend applies the state-update rule to the system upon observing an outcome of her measurement in a quantum system, Wigner describes the friend’s measurement as a unitary evolution, resulting in an entangled state for the composite system of the friend and the system. In this respect, Wigner is often referred to as a “superobserver,” who has the supreme technological ability to keep the friend’s laboratory coherent. As such, it is often argued that he has the “correct” description of the state. Here, we show that the situation is more symmetrical than is usually thought: There are different types of information that each of the observers has that the other fundamentally cannot have—they reside in different “bubbles” (in Cavalcanti’s terminology). While this can explain why the objectivity of the state assignment is only relative to the bubble, we consider more elaborated situations in the form of a game in which the players can switch between bubbles. We find that, in certain circumstances, observers may be entitled to adopt and verify the state assignment from another bubble if they condition their predictions on all information that is in principle available to them.
- Organisation(s)
- Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information
- External organisation(s)
- Université de Genève, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW), University of the Balearic Islands, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
- Journal
- Physical Review Research
- Volume
- 7
- No. of pages
- 11
- ISSN
- 2643-1564
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.06279
- Publication date
- 09-2025
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103025 Quantum mechanics, 103026 Quantum optics
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Physics and Astronomy
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/255983ef-aeed-421a-bcd1-767474fb3d50