Elementary Particle Mixing for Maximum Channel Capacity in Measured Decays

We adopt the channel capacity formalism from quantum infor-mation theory and suggest that it is fundamental to particle decays at the smallest space-time scale. A key to this application is to represent mixing, decay, and measurement as a quantum channel in which auxiliary (non-system) decay products form the ‘environ-ment’. A new type of classical-to-quantum complementarity is sug-gested to apply to particle identity. The stochastic nature of this complimentarity is described by an ‘implied ensemble ’ that involves particle identity, particle quantum states, and transformations as revealed through repeated measurements. In the theory of quantum channels there is also the concept of exchange entropy, which leads to a measure of the reversibility of the channel operation. We com-pute the measure for various decay mechanism. It is suggested that channel capacity-based mixing is part of the underlying physics of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa mixing between fermionic gener-ations. Keywords: quantum channel capacity, elementary particle decays, lepton/quark generations. PACS Number: 03.65.BZ. Please direct correspondence to R.Y. Levine