APPARENT WAVE-FUNCTION COLLAPSE CAUSED BY SCATTERING

Some experimental implications of the recent progress on wave function collapse axe calculated. Exact results axe derived for the center-of-mass wave function collapse caused by random scatterings and applied to a range of specific examples. The results show that recently proposed experiments to measure the GRW effect are likely to fail, since the effect of naturally occurring scatterings is of the same form as the GRW effect but generally much stronger. The same goes for attempts to measure the collapse caused by quantum gravity as suggested by Hawking and others. The results also indicate that macroscopic systems tend to be found in states with DELTAxDELTAp = HBAR/square-root 2, but microscopic systems in highly tiltedly squeezed states with DELTAxDELTAp >> h.