A Warped Born Rule Turns an Observer into a Maxwell's Demon

2026-10-12 · arXiv Quantum Physics

arXiv:2610.13936v1 Announce Type: new

Abstract: Quantum mechanics seems to be an incredibly delicate theory. Slight alterations to nearly any part of its structure can lead to huge qualitative differences and wildly unphysical predictions. Here, we explore the many-body consequences of replacing the Born rule $p(m)\propto\|P_m|\psi \rangle|^2$ by a warped rule $p_b(m)\propto\|P_m|\psi\rangle\|^{2b}$. Specifically, in systems with conserved particle number, evolution punctuated by repeated local particle observations acquires a probabilistic bias over measurement histories with an effect controlled by the sign of $b-1$. For $b1$, this bias generically drives the gas to collect into nearly frozen configurations. Similar to the action of Maxwell's demon, the simple act of observation seems to extract entropy from a closed system. For $b

原文链接：https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13936

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