Unstable trajectories and the quantum mechanical uncertainty Original Research Article

There is still an ongoing discussion about various seemingly contradictory aspects of classical particle motion and its quantum mechanical counterpart. One of the best accepted viewpoints that intend to bridge the gap is the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation. A major issue there is to regard wave functions as probability amplitudes (usually for the position of a particle). However, the literature also reports on approaches that claim a trajectory for any quantum mechanical particle, Bohmian mechanics probably being the most prominent one among these ideas. We introduce a way to calculate trajectories as well, but our crucial ingredient is their well controlled local (thus also momentaneous) degree of instability. By construction, at every moment their unpredictability, i.e., their local separation rates of neighboring trajectories, is governed by the local value of the given modulus square of a wave function. We present extensive numerical simulations of the H and He atom, and for some velocity-related quantities, namely angular momentum and total energy, we inspect their agreement with the values appearing in wave mechanics. Further, we interpret the archetypal double slit interference experiment in the spirit of our findings. We also discuss many-particle problems far beyond He, which guides us to a variety of possible applications.