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It "jumps" on a macroscopic scale. Shot noise is of course only measurable on an ensemble. Here you use a single atom and excite it with lasers, i.e., you prepare it with a time-dependent external em. field. The shot noise comes from very many excitation-relaxation processes. So it's no contradiction to the ensemble interpretation at all. I still don't know, how to make sense of the probabilistic content of QT according to Born's rule if not by measuring an ensemble, be it the preparation of many identical atoms or, as in this case, a single atom in a trap, a quantum dot and other fascinating ways the AMO physicists can handle nowadays!A. Neumaier said:If I remember correctly, the quantum jumps are jumps of the state of a single atom, measured through a continuous measurement that produces shot noise in the excited stated but none in the ground state. Thus by observing the presence or absence of shot noise one can see or hear when the atom is in the ground state or in the excited state. And one finds that the atom jumps in both directions (one stimulated, the other spontaneous) and then stays some time before it jumps again, and part of it is controllable externally.