Quantum Equilibrium and the Role of Operators as Observables in Quantum Theory
By D. Dürr, Sheldon Goldstein, Nino Zanghí. 2003
186 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Bohmian mechanics is arguably the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schrödinger's equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function ψits configuration is typically random, with probability density ρgiven by |ψ|2, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, naturally emerges in Bohmian mechanics from the analysis of “measurements.” This analysis reveals the status of operators as observables in the description of quantum phenomena, and facilitates a clear view of the range of applicability of the usual quantum mechanical formulas.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mathematical Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/134da916015be28b2ac1f3b24f61570c8efcd08d
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Citations in the corpus
- Bohmian Mechanics (2009, background): “The statistics of the random outcome Z of an experiment in a world governed by Bohmian mechanics on a system with wave function ψ can be shown [8] always to be of the form (in Dirac notation)”
- Reality and the Role of the Wavefunction in Quantum Theory (2011, background): “…that it is something (but not everything), as with Bohmian mechanics, for example, where there’s the wave function and something else, or (iii) maybe it’s nothing—that would solve the problem of what’s this weird thing, the wave function: if you can get rid of it you don’t have to agonize about it.”