Why engineers are right to avoid the quantum reality offered by the orthodox theory? [point of view]

Abstract

We are currently in the middle of a second quantum revolution where the rules discovered a century ago to understand the quantum world are being applied to develop new quantum technologies [1]. Yet, most of the understanding of quantum physics is developed from the orthodox (also known as the Copenhagen) interpretation of the quantum phenomena [2], [3]. However, the orthodox theory has important difficulties in providing an intuitive view of quantum This article has supplementary downloadable material available at

Can Wigner distribution functions with collisions satisfy complete positivity and energy conservation?

“…Finally, we want to mention that most of the difficulties of the Wigner distribution function to satisfy energy conservation in collisions, are inherited form the difficulties of its father description, the density matrix, to tackle the properties of individual particles. At the end of the day, these problems are just a manifestation of the orthodox statements that negates any microscopic properties for particles, unless such microscopic properties are being measured explicitly [20]. However, a collision is not a measurement, so that the orthodox theory forbids to access to the microscopic information on what has happened to each electron during the collision.…”

“…However, a collision is not a measurement, so that the orthodox theory forbids to access to the microscopic information on what has happened to each electron during the collision. For these reasons, we argue that collision models based on the (Bohmian) conditional wave function are very promising because they have the ability to describe the microscopic properties of individual particles and satisfy conditions (23) and (25) in a very natural way [20][21][22][35][36][37][38].…”

“…The present model can be extended to an open system through the use of the so-called Bohmian conditional wavefunction for electron wavefunctions A (x, t) and B (x, t) . For an overview on Bohmian mechanics, we recall [18,19], and for a definition and properties of the Bohmian conditional wavefunction see [20][21][22].…”

“…We consider now an electron defined by a single-particle state (x, t) . As indicated above, for an open system like an electron device, such state can be understood as a Bohmian conditional wavefunction [20][21][22] where only the degree of freedom of the electron is considered (x, t) ≡ (x, q(t), t) while the degree of freedom of the photon q is fixed to some particular (Bohmian) value q(t). See [22] for more details.…”

“…This new element in the equation of motion is what is usually called the collision term. Typical examples found in the literature following this strategy are Green function [3][4][5], the density matrix [6,7], Wigner distribution function [8][9][10][11][12][13][14], the master equation [15,16], Kubo formalism [17], conditional wave functions [20][21][22], etc.…”