Quantifying the failure of Schr\"odinger dynamics in the free expansion of relativistic particles

TL;DR

This paper quantifies how Schrödinger dynamics fails to accurately describe highly energetic relativistic particles, revealing potential superluminal signaling and causality violations at high Lorentz factors.

Contribution

It introduces a method to measure the breakdown of Schrödinger dynamics in relativistic regimes using light cone probability violations, with exact asymptotic expressions.

Findings

Schrödinger dynamics predicts superluminal signaling above Lorentz factor 129.

The violation of local causality increases with energy and is characterized by the particle's Compton wavelength.

A precise asymptotic expression for causality violation is derived using the stationary exponent method.

Abstract

It is known that Schr\"odinger equation fails in describing the dynamics of highly energetic particles. We propose to quantify this lack of Lorentz covariance by evaluating the probability for a particle to be measured outside the set of light cones which are compatible to its initial wave function. We consider a simple case of a particle released from a box, which, in turn, is inside a larger container. It is shown that besides the increasing error at relativistic energies, there may be a complete breakdown, with Schr\"odinger dynamics implying in deterministic, superluminal signaling for Lorentz factors above 129. In addition, we give an exact asymptotic expression for the violation in local causality by employing the stationary exponent method, from which the Compton wave length of the particle naturally arises as the relevant scale for the stationary points.