Influence of the measurement on the decay law: the bang-bang case

Abstract

After reviewing the description of an unstable state in the framework of nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics (QM) and relativistic Quantum Field Theory (QFT), we consider the effect of pulsed, ideal measurements repeated at equal time intervals on the lifetime of an unstable system. In particular, we investigate the case in which the `bare' survival probability is an exact exponential (a very good approximation in both QM and QFT), but the measurement apparatus can detect the decay products only in a certain energy range. We show that the Quantum Zeno Effect can occur in this framework as well.