Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-quantum-information-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/paper-1/1/a/solution

Linearity of the detector's unitary time evolution maps the two input branches separately, giving the quantum premeasurement state
In the ordered tensor product basis , its pure density matrix is
A nonselective projective measurement in the indicated detector basis applies , removing the two off-diagonal terms:
This is the usual nonselective meaning of von Neumann process 1. It is not equal to the pure projector . If “the detector has clicked” means conditioning on an actual up outcome, the normalized postselected state is instead , with probability . The correlated superposition describes the coherent premeasurement before that selection.

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