Wave Function Ontology

I argue that the wave function ontology for quantum mechanics is an undesirable ontology. This ontology holds that the fundamental space in which entities evolve is not three-dimensional, but instead 3N-dimensional, where N is the number of particles standardly thought to exist in three-dimensional space. I show that the state of three-dimensional objects does not supervene on the state of objects in 3N-dimensional space. I also show that the only way to guarantee the existence of the appropriate mental states in the wave function ontology has undesirable metaphysical baggage: either mind/body dualism is true, or circumstances which we take to be logically possible turn out to be logically impossible

The wave function discord

Linde's proposal of a Euclidean path integral with the ``wrong'' sign of Euclidean action is often identified with the tunneling proposal for the wave function of the universe. However, the two proposals are in fact quite different. I illustrate the difference and point out that recent criticism by Hawking and Turok does not apply to the tunneling proposal.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Holographic Tunneling Wave Function

The Hartle-Hawking wave function in cosmology can be viewed as a decaying wave function with anti-de Sitter (AdS) boundary conditions. We show that the growing wave function in AdS familiar from Euclidean AdS/CFT is equivalent, semiclassically and up to surface terms, to the tunneling wave function in cosmology. The cosmological measure in the tunneling state is given by the partition function of certain relevant deformations of CFTs on a locally AdS boundary. We compute the partition function of finite constant mass deformations of the O(N) vector model on the round three sphere and show this qualitatively reproduces the behaviour of the tunneling wave function in Einstein gravity coupled to a positive cosmological constant and a massive scalar. We find the amplitudes of inhomogeneities are not damped in the holographic tunneling state.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, Revisions according to the JHEP edito

Transverse Momentum Dependent Light-Cone Wave Function of B-Meson and Relation to the Momentum Integrated One

A direct generalization of the transverse momentum integrated(TMI) light-cone wave function to define a transverse momentum dependent(TMD) light-cone wave function will cause light-cone singularities and they spoil TMD factorization. We motivate a definition in which the light-cone singularities are regularized with non-light like Wilson lines. The defined TMD light-cone wave function has some interesting relations to the corresponding TMI one. When the transverse momentum is very large, the TMD light-cone wave function is determined perturbatively in term of the TMI one. In the impact $b$-space with a small $b$, the TMD light-cone wave function can be factorized in terms of the TMI one. In this letter we study these relations. By-products of our study are the renormalization evolution of the TMI light-cone wave function and the Collins-Soper equation of the TMD light-cone wave function, the later will be useful for resumming Sudakov logarithms.Comment: Minor change in text, 7 pages, two figure

Realism and the wave-function

Realism -- the idea that the concepts in physical theories refer to 'things' existing in the real world -- is introduced as a tool to analyze the status of the wave-function. Although the physical entities are recognized by the existence of invariant quantities, examples from classical and quantum physics suggest that not all the theoretical terms refer to the entities: some terms refer to properties of the entities, and some terms have only an epistemic function. In particular, it is argued that the wave-function may be written in terms of classical non-referring and epistemic terms. The implications for realist interpretations of quantum mechanics and on the teaching of quantum physics are examined.Comment: No figure

Generalized Relativistic Meson Wave Function

We study the most general, relativistic, constituent $q{\overline q}$ meson wave function within a new covariant framework. We find that by including a tensor wave function component, a pure valence quark model is now capable of reproducing not only all static pion data ($f_\pi$, $\langle r_\pi^2 \rangle$) but also the distribution amplitude, form factor $(F_\pi(Q^2))$, and structure functions. Further, our generalized spin wave function provides a much better detailed description of meson properties than models using a simple relativistic extension of the $S=L=0$ nonrelativistic wave function.Comment: 17 pages, REXTeX 3.0 file, (uuencoded postscript files of 8 figures appended