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Feynman Paths and Weak Values

There has been a recent revival of interest in the notion of a ‘trajectory’ of a quantum particle. In this paper, we detail the relationship between Dirac’s ideas, Feynman paths and the Bohm approach. The key to the relationship is the weak value of the momentum which Feynman calls a transition prob...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Flack, Robert, Hiley, Basil J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7512885/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33265457
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e20050367
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author Flack, Robert
Hiley, Basil J.
author_facet Flack, Robert
Hiley, Basil J.
author_sort Flack, Robert
collection PubMed
description There has been a recent revival of interest in the notion of a ‘trajectory’ of a quantum particle. In this paper, we detail the relationship between Dirac’s ideas, Feynman paths and the Bohm approach. The key to the relationship is the weak value of the momentum which Feynman calls a transition probability amplitude. With this identification we are able to conclude that a Bohm ‘trajectory’ is the average of an ensemble of actual individual stochastic Feynman paths. This implies that they can be interpreted as the mean momentum flow of a set of individual quantum processes and not the path of an individual particle. This enables us to give a clearer account of the experimental two-slit results of Kocsis et al.
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spelling pubmed-75128852020-11-09 Feynman Paths and Weak Values Flack, Robert Hiley, Basil J. Entropy (Basel) Article There has been a recent revival of interest in the notion of a ‘trajectory’ of a quantum particle. In this paper, we detail the relationship between Dirac’s ideas, Feynman paths and the Bohm approach. The key to the relationship is the weak value of the momentum which Feynman calls a transition probability amplitude. With this identification we are able to conclude that a Bohm ‘trajectory’ is the average of an ensemble of actual individual stochastic Feynman paths. This implies that they can be interpreted as the mean momentum flow of a set of individual quantum processes and not the path of an individual particle. This enables us to give a clearer account of the experimental two-slit results of Kocsis et al. MDPI 2018-05-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7512885/ /pubmed/33265457 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e20050367 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Flack, Robert
Hiley, Basil J.
Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title_full Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title_fullStr Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title_full_unstemmed Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title_short Feynman Paths and Weak Values
title_sort feynman paths and weak values
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7512885/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33265457
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e20050367
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