A Bohmian Analysis Of Afshar's Experiment

TL;DR

This paper explores Bohmian mechanics as a foundation for quantum theory and analyzes Afshar's interferometry experiment to assess claims about simultaneous wave and particle property observation.

Contribution

It provides a Bohmian perspective on Afshar's experiment, challenging the interpretation of simultaneous wave and particle property measurement.

Findings

Bohmian mechanics offers a clear interpretation of quantum phenomena.

Afshar's experiment challenges traditional duality principles.

The analysis questions the claim of observing both properties simultaneously.

Abstract

This work is about Bohmian mechanics, a non-relativistic quantum theory about the motion of particles and their trajectories, named after its inventor David Bohm (Bohm,1952). This mechanics resolves all paradoxes associated with the measurement problem in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. It accounts for quantum randomness, absolute uncertainty, the meaning of the wave function of a system, collapse of the wave function, and familiar (macroscopic) reality. We review the purpose for which Bohmian trajectories were invented: to serve as the foundation of quantum mechanics, i.e., to explain quantum mechanics in terms of a theory that is free of paradoxes and allows an understanding that is as clear as that of classical mechanics. To achieve this we analyse an optical interferometry experiment devised and carried out 2005 by Shahriar Afshar (Afshar,2005). The radical claim of Afshar implies in his own words the 'observation of physical reality in the classical sense' for both 'which path (particle-like)' and 'interference (wave-like)' properties of photons in the same experimental setup through the violation of the Englert-Greenberger duality relation (Englert,1996) that according to Englert can be regarded as quantifying of the 'principle of complementarity'.