Quantum Measurements of Time

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Mar 20;124(11):110402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.110402.

Abstract

We propose a time-of-arrival operator in quantum mechanics by conditioning on a quantum clock. This allows us to bypass some of the problems of previous proposals, and to obtain a Hermitian time of arrival operator whose probability distribution arises from the Born rule and which has a clear physical interpretation. The same procedure can be employed to measure the "time at which some event happens" for arbitrary events (and not just specifically for the arrival time of a particle).