Zeno Dynamics and Distinguishability of Quantum States

Abstract

According to the quantum Zeno effect, the frequent observations of a system can dramatically slow down its dynamical evolution. We show that the Zeno dynamics is the result of projective measurements among quantum states which are indistinguishable. The physical time scale of the problem is provided by the Cramer-Rao lower bound, which measure the distinguishability of states along a path in the Hilbert space. We finally show that the Zeno dynamics with particle entangled states might require quite smaller measurement intervals than classically correlated states, and propose a realistic interferometric experiment to test the prediction.