Bohmian Mechanics at Space-Time Singularities. II. Spacelike Singularities

TL;DR

This paper extends Bohmian mechanics to curved space-times with spacelike singularities, defining particle trajectories and evolution laws that account for particle annihilation and creation at singularities, using density matrices and a quasi-Lindblad equation.

Contribution

It introduces a Bohmian framework for spacelike singularities, incorporating non-conserved particle number and density matrices, with a new evolution equation for such scenarios.

Findings

Particles are annihilated or created at singularities consistent with the direction of time.

The evolution of the density matrix follows a quasi-Lindblad form.

The approach accommodates non-conservation of particle number in curved space-times.

Abstract

We develop an extension of Bohmian mechanics by defining Bohm-like trajectories for quantum particles in a curved background space-time containing a spacelike singularity. As an example of such a metric we use the Schwarzschild metric, which contains two spacelike singularities, one in the past and one in the future. Since the particle world lines are everywhere timelike or lightlike, particles can be annihilated but not created at a future spacelike singularity, and created but not annihilated at a past spacelike singularity. It is argued that in the presence of future (past) spacelike singularities, there is a unique natural Bohm-like evolution law directed to the future (past). This law differs from the one in non-singular space-times mainly in two ways: it involves Fock space since the particle number is not conserved, and the wave function is replaced by a density matrix. In particular, we determine the evolution equation for the density matrix, a pure-to-mixed evolution equation of a quasi-Lindblad form. We have to leave open whether a curvature cut-off needs to be introduced for this equation to be well defined.