Towards New Ways to Think about Quantum Mechanics: Bohmian Mechanics and Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

Shortly after Schrödinger published his renowned work on the evolution of wave functions, Madelung recast those equations into a hydrodynamic form, making apparent a close analogy between the diffusion of the wave function in a configuration space and that undergone by classical fluids. However, it was not until Bohm published his counterargumentation on von Neumann’s theory that a different way to think about quantum mechanics, in terms of well-defined trajectories rather than “black-box” operators and probabilities, started stirring minds within the physics community. Although silenced for several decades, this way of thinking, supported by Madelung’s and Bohm’s view, emerged with renewed strength and interest in the mid-1970s and the 1980s, undergoing an unstoppable and irreversible boost in the 2000s that permeated not only the original field of quantum foundations, but also many different applied areas of physics and chemistry. With it, de Broglie’s former pilot wave program (with direct connections to Bohmian mechanics) has also undergone an important push forward, which is also partly due to the recent fluid dynamics experiments with bouncing droplets.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to gather contributions to the field aimed at showing the potentialities of this new way of thinking, ranging from the most fundamental ones, covering its mathematical and metaphysical implications, to applications from within a wide variety of fields (optics, quantum information, chemical physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, atomic and molecular physics, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum metrology, etc.) but not constrained to quantum physics. It might also include recent developments in quantum-classical correspondence systems, analogous to the bouncing droplets.

Dr. Ángel Santiago Sanz Ortiz
Guest Editor

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• Bohmian mechanics (theory and applications)
• foundations of quantum mechanics
• interpretations of quantum mechanics
• quantum hydrodynamics
• bouncing droplets