Stability of quantum eigenstates and kinetics of wave function collapse in a fluctuating environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability and dynamics of quantum eigenstates under environmental fluctuations using a stochastic quantum hydrodynamic model, revealing their intrinsic stability, dependence on initial conditions, and potential alignment with the Born rule.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic quantum hydrodynamic approach to define quantum eigenstates without measurement or classical mechanics, and explores how superpositions relax to eigenstates.

Findings

Quantum eigenstates remain stable under slow fluctuations.

Superpositions relax to stationary eigenstates depending on initial conditions.

The model suggests a possible derivation of the Born rule from stochastic dynamics.

Abstract

The work analyzes the stability of the quantum eigenstates when they are submitted to fluctuations by using the stochastic generalization of the Madelung quantum hydrodynamic approach. In the limit of sufficiently slow kinetics, the quantum eigenstates show to remain stationary configurations with a very small perturbation of their mass density distribution. The work shows that the stochastic quantum hydrodynamic model allows to obtain the definition of the quantum eigenstates without recurring to the measurement process or any reference to the classical mechanics, by identifying them from their intrinsic properties of stationarity and stability. By using the discrete approach, the path integral solution of the stochastic quantum-hydrodynamic equation has been derived in order to investigate how the final stationary configurations depend by the the initial condition of the quatum superposition of states. The stochastic quantum hydrodynamics shows that the superposition of states can relax to different stationary states that, in the small noise limit, are the slightly perturbed quantum eigenstates. The work shows that the final stationary eigenstate depends by the initial configuration of the superposition of states and that possibly the probability transition to each eigenstates can satisfy the Born rule, allowing the decoherence process to be compatible with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.