57 research outputs found
Wavefunction Collapse and Conservation Laws
It is emphasized that the collapse postulate of standard quantum theory can
violate conservation of energy-momentum and there is no indication from where
the energy-momentum comes or to where it goes. Likewise, in the Continuous
Spontaneous Localization (CSL) dynamical collapse model, particles gain energy
on average. In CSL, the usual Schr\"odinger dynamics is altered so that a
randomly fluctuating classical field interacts with quantized particles to
cause wavefunction collapse. In this paper it is shown how to define energy for
the classical field so that the average value of the energy of the field plus
the quantum system {\it is} conserved for the ensemble of collapsing
wavefunctions. While conservation of just the first moment of energy is, of
course, much less than complete conservation of energy, this does support the
idea that the field could provide the conservation law balance when events
occur.Comment: 15 page
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