Timing quantum particles from the perspective of Bohmian mechanics

Sheldon Goldstein

Many recent results suggest that quantum theory is about information, and that quantum theory is best understood as arising from principles concerning information and information processing. At the same time, by far the simplest version of quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics, is concerned, not with information but with the behavior of an objective microscopic reality given by particles and their positions. What I would like to do here is to examine whether, and to what extent, the importance of information, observation, and the like in quantum theory can be understood from a Bohmian perspective. I would like to explore the hypothesis that the idea that information plays a special role in physics naturally emerges in a Bohmian universe. 1 Introduction: The Status

Arthur Fine, Sheldon Goldstein, James T. Cushing

Enrique Colomés, Guillermo Albareda, Zhen Zhan +4 more

This chapter discusses how Bohmian mechanics can help us to understand and model the behavior of novel electron device prototypes at the nanometer and picosecond scales. It shows that how Bohmian mechanics can help us in the understanding and designing the upcoming electron device prototypes. The chapter also discusses how Bohmian mechanics can help us to study many-particle quantum electron transport phenomena in nanoelectronic devices and an important advantage of Bohmian mechanics: its ability to treat many-particle systems. It explains the birth of the electronics and its evolution towards nanoelectronics. The chapter also shows that the Bohmian perspective provides useful tools when dealing with the continuous measurement of the electrical current in nanodevices. The former appears at nonzero temperature, where the thermal agitation causes the occupation of energy states to fluctuate. The practical expressions for the computation of the current fluctuations within Bohmian mechanics are quite simple.

Dirk, André Deckert

Siddhant Das

The prediction of arrival time or first passage time statistics of a quantum particle is an open problem, which challenges the foundations of quantum theory. One of the most promising and insightful approaches to this problem stems from the de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory (a.k.a Bohmian mechanics). Applying the fundamental postulates of this theory, we analyze a simplified first passage time experiment and derive the empirical passage time distribution $Π(τ)$. Implications of our results are also discussed.

Ángel S. Sanz, Salvador Miret-Artés