Jul 5 – 10, 2021
Europe/Rome timezone

Times of arrival and gauge invariance

Jul 5, 2021, 5:10 PM
20m
Invited talk in the parallel session Mathematical Problems of Relativistic Physics: Classical and Quantum Mathematical Problems of Relativistic Physics: Classical and Quantum

Speaker

Siddhant Das (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen)

Description

Arrival-time operators (or observables) describing time-of-flight experiments are naturally constrained by gauge invariance requirements. Surveying the literature on time operators, including POVMs, I will show that a natural generalization of Aharonov-Bohm-Kijowski's arrival-time distribution (referred to as the ``standard arrival-time distribution'' by some authors) fails to be gauge invariant. In particular, this undermines the associated time-energy uncertainty relations. A direct comparison to the quantum flux distribution, which does not exhibit this flaw, and which does not correspond to a quantum observable (or POVM), will be drawn (its acknowledged drawback concerning the quantum backflow effect notwithstanding). Ref: S. Das and M. Nöth, Proc. R. Soc. A. 477 (2021)

Primary author

Siddhant Das (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen)

Presentation materials

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