Does a Quantum Particle Know its Own Energy?
Abstract
If a wave function does not describe microscopic reality then what does? Reformulating quantum mechanics in path-integral terms leads to a notion of "precluded event" and thence to the proposal that quantal reality differs from classical reality in the same way as a set of worldlines differs from a single worldline. One can then ask, for example, which sets of electron trajectories correspond to a Hydrogen atom in its ground state and how they differ from those of an excited state. We address the analogous questions for simple model that replaces the electron by a particle hopping (in discrete time) on a circular lattice.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1304.7550,
title = {Does a Quantum Particle Know its Own Energy?},
author = {Rafael D. Sorkin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.7550},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
plainTeX, 15 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Journal of Physics: Conf. Ser. Most current version is available at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/rsorkin/some.papers/ (or wherever my home-page may be, such as http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers/)