With the recent surge of interest in quantum computation, it has become very important to develop clear experimental tests for “quantum behavior” in a system. This issue has been addressed in the past in the form of the inequalities due to Bell and those due to Leggett and Garg. These inequalities concern the results of ideal projective measurements, however, which are experimentally difficult to perform in many proposed qubit designs, especially in many solid-state qubit systems. Here, we show that weak continuous measurements, which are often practical to implement experimentally, can yield particularly clear signatures of quantum coherence, both in the measured correlation functions and in the measured power spectrum.

• Received 13 May 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.200404