Quantum reality with negative-mass particles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a retrocausal ontological model for quantum mechanics that interprets weak values as real properties of exotic particles with potentially negative or imaginary masses, providing a clearer physical picture.

Contribution

It introduces a top-down ontological framework that treats weak values as real during pre- and post-selection, resolving paradoxes and describing exotic particles with negative or imaginary masses.

Findings

Weak values are interpreted as real properties of exotic particles.

The model avoids quantum paradoxes through a top-down approach.

Exotic particles with negative or imaginary masses are consistent with quantum phenomena.

Abstract

Physical interpretations of the time-symmetric formulation of quantum mechanics, due to Aharonov, Bergmann, and Lebowitz are discussed in terms of weak values. The most direct, yet somewhat naive, interpretation uses the time-symmetric formulation to assign eigenvalues to unmeasured observables of a system, which results in logical paradoxes, and no clear physical picture. A top-down ontological model is introduced that treats the weak values of observables as physically real during the time between pre- and post-selection (PPS), which avoids these paradoxes. The generally delocalized rank-1 projectors of a quantum system describe its fundamental ontological elements, and the highest-rank projectors corresponding to individual localized objects describe an emergent particle model, with unusual particles whose masses and energies may be negative or imaginary. This retrocausal top-down model leads to an intuitive particle-based ontological picture, wherein weak measurements directly probe the properties of these exotic particles, which exist whether or not they are actually measured