Quantum determinism and completeness restored by indistinguishability and long-time particle detection

TL;DR

This paper argues that quantum measurement outcomes should be viewed as statistical results of indistinguishable particles and long-time detection, challenging the fundamental probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and restoring realism, locality, and causality.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-field-theoretic approach to measurement, emphasizing indistinguishability and long-time detection, which challenges the traditional Born rule and restores classical notions.

Findings

Measurement data are inherently statistical over many events.

Abandoning the Born rule at the single-particle level restores realism and causality.

Indistinguishability and long-time detection make quantum physics deterministic.

Abstract

We argue that measurement data in quantum physics can be rigorously interpreted only as a result of a statistical, macroscopic process, taking into account the indistinguishable character of identical particles. Quantum determinism is in principle possible on the condition that a fully-fledged quantum-field-theoretic model is used to describe the measurement device in interaction with the studied object as one system. In contrast, any approach that relies on Born's rule discriminates the dynamics of a quantum system from that of the detector with which it interacts during measurement. In this work, we critically analyze the validity of this measurement postulate applied to single-event signals. In fact, the concept of ``individual'' particle becomes inadequate once both indistinguishability and a scattering approach allowing an unlimited interaction time for an effective detection, are considered as they should be, hence preventing the separability of two successive measurement events. In this context, measurement data should therefore be understood only as a result of statistics over many events. Accounting for the intrinsic noise of the sources and the detectors, we also show with the illustrative cases of the Schr\"odinger cat and the Bell experiment that once the Born rule is abandoned on the level of a single particle, realism, locality and causality are restored. We conclude that indiscernibility and long-time detection process make quantum physics not fundamentally probabilistic.