IN-PERSON MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR
Roderich Tumulka- Eberhard Karls University Tubingen
Date/Time/Location
Thursday, April 4th, 12:10pm; Hill Center 705
On the Measurability of Arrival Times
In an arrival-time experiment, one places detectors along the surface of a 3d region Omega and a quantum particle inside Omega, and asks when and where a detector will fire. Experts do not agree on how to predict the probability distribution of the detection time and place. I will discuss several proposals, especially that one should simply take the distribution of the time and place of first arrival of the Bohmian trajectory on the boundary of Omega, a proposal advocated particularly by Das and Dürr (2019). I will explain why the presence of detectors can change the trajectories, which makes the proposal questionable. Even more, I will prove that Bohmian mechanics, when applied systematically to this problem, predicts a different distribution than this proposal. That is, paradoxically as it may sound at first, the Bohmian arrival time turns out not to be measurable in Bohmian mechanics. This is joint work with Shelly Goldstein and Nino Zanghi.