Spacetime alternatives in relativistic particle motion

TL;DR

This paper explores spacetime coarse grainings in the quantum mechanics of a relativistic particle, aiming to understand how probabilities can be assigned in a theory where spacetime notions are inherently quantum and nonlocal.

Contribution

It extends the concept of spacetime coarse grainings to relativistic particles within a reparametrization-invariant framework, analyzing decoherence and probability assignment using sum-over-histories formalism.

Findings

Certain initial conditions lead to decoherence.

Probabilities can be assigned despite nonlocality.

The approach models features of quantum gravity.

Abstract

One of the reasons we expect a standard quantum mechanics, which predicts probabilities for alternatives defined on spacelike slices, to be inadequate for quantum gravity is that the notion of ``spacelike'' is ill-defined in a theory where the metric itself is behaving quantum-mechanically. Spacetime coarse grainings--sets of alternatives defined with respect to a region extended in time as well as space--have previously been considered in the quantum mechanics of a single nonrelativistic particle. This work examines spacetime coarse grainings in the quantum mechanics of a free *relativistic* particle, not as a theory for real particles (which are described by quantum field theory) but as a simple reparametrization-invariant theory which may model some features of quantum gravity. We use Hartle's sum-over-histories generalized quantum mechanics formalism, in which probabilities are assigned to a set of alternatives if they decohere, i.e., if the quantum-mechanical interference between their branches of the initial state is nearly zero. For one extremely simple set of alternatives, we calculate these branches. Despite the nonlocality of the positive-definite version of the Klein-Gordon inner product, some initial conditions are found to give decoherence and allow the consistent assignment of probabilities.