Born's Rule for Arbitrary Cauchy Surfaces
Abstract
Suppose that particle detectors are placed along a Cauchy surface in Minkowski space-time, and consider a quantum theory with fixed or variable number of particles (i.e., using Fock space or a subspace thereof). It is straightforward to guess what Born's rule should look like for this setting: The probability distribution of the detected configuration on has density , where is a suitable wave function on , and the operation is suitably interpreted. We call this statement the "curved Born rule." Since in any one Lorentz frame, the appropriate measurement postulates referring to constant- hyperplanes should determine the probabilities of the outcomes of any conceivable experiment, they should also imply the curved Born rule. This is what we are concerned with here: deriving Born's rule for from Born's rule in one Lorentz frame (along with a collapse rule). We describe two ways of defining an idealized detection process, and prove for one of them that the probability distribution coincides with . For this result, we need two hypotheses on the time evolution: that there is no interaction faster than light, and that there is no propagation faster than light. The wave function can be obtained from the Tomonaga--Schwinger equation, or from a multi-time wave function by inserting configurations on . Thus, our result establishes in particular how multi-time wave functions are related to detection probabilities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.07074,
title = {Born's Rule for Arbitrary Cauchy Surfaces},
author = {Matthias Lienert and Roderich Tumulka},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07074},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
53 pages LaTeX, 11 figures