Maaneli Derakhshani

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Department of Mathematics

Stochastic mechanics (SM), as proposed by Edward Nelson and others in the 20th century, aims to reconstruct quantum mechanics (QM) from a more fundamental theory of classical point particles interacting with a classical-like ether, where said interaction causes the particles to undergo a diffusion process that conserves their average total energy....

This is a progress report on a preliminary feasibility study of experimental setups for preparing and probing a gravitational cat state [1].

Talk for the workshop, "The Hitchhiker's Advanced Guide to Quantum Collapse Models and their impact on science, philosophy, technology and biology", November 2, 2022. https://agenda.infn.it/event/32081/timetable/#all.detailed

We address a long-standing criticism of the stochastic mechanics approach to quantum theory by one of its pioneers, Edward Nelson: multi-time correlations in stochastic mechanics differ from those in textbook quantum theory. We elaborate upon an answer to this criticism by Blan-chard et al. (1986), who showed that if the (derived) wave function in...

We address a long-standing criticism of the stochastic mechanics approach to quantum theory by one of its pioneers, Edward Nelson: multi-time correlations in stochastic mechanics differ from those in textbook quantum theory. We elaborate upon an answer to this criticism by Blanchard et al. (1986), who showed that if the (derived) wave function in s...

In this paper we perform a critical analysis of the Orch OR consciousness theory at the crossroad with the newest experimental results coming from the search for spontaneous radiation predicted by the simplest version of gravity-related dynamical collapse models. We conclude that Orch OR theory, when based on the simplest version of gravity-related...

After reviewing what is known about the passage from the classical Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of non-relativistic point-particle dynamics to the non-relativistic quantum dynamics of point particles whose motion is guided by a wave function that satisfies Schr\"odinger's or Pauli's equation, we study the analogous question for the Lorentz-covariant...

Talk at the APS March Meeting, Boston, 2019.

I show that Hawking's semiclassical argument for black hole evaporation is inconsistent with the assumption of state-vector collapse. I then argue that the quantum geometrodynamical generalization of Hawking's argument, coupled with the many-worlds approach, doesn't work either. Finally, I point out inconsistencies between Hawking's semiclassical a...

I argue that the stochastic mechanics framework constitutes a viable foundation for quantum mechanics (despite widespread belief to the contrary). I also discuss current work extending stochastic mechanics to semiclassical gravity and non-Markovian dynamics.

Talk given at physics workshop at Dartmouth College, Gravity in the Quantum Regime, June 29, 2018 (invited by Dr. Alexander Smith), and at philosophy of physics workshop at Utrecht University, May 8, 2018 (invited by Prof. Dennis Dieks).

Invited talk for Prof. Claus Kiefer's group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne (April 2018). Also given at Gravity in the Quantum Regime workshop at Dartmouth College (July 2018).

Stochastic mechanics (SM), as proposed by Edward Nelson and others in the 20th century, aims to reconstruct quantum mechanics (QM) from a more fundamental theory of classical point particles interacting with a classical-like ether, where said interaction causes the particles to undergo a diffusion process that conserves their average total energy....

Short (10 minute) talk in which I sketch the basic idea of stochastic mechanics, the "Wallstrom criticism" thereof, and the basic idea of my proposed reformulation of stochastic mechanics to answer the Wallstrom criticism. http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR18/Session/L26.6

An experimental design to prepare and probe a gravitational cat state (hereafter, the grav-cat setup) is described, and its connection to foundational issues in quantum gravity and quantum mechanics are discussed. The grav-cat setup is first described within the standard non-relativistic quantum description of Newtonian gravity. While the standard...

Abstract: A gravitational cat state refers to the gravitational field sourced by a mass density in a quantum superposition of two position states. The first part of the talk will begin with an overview of the "grav-cat" setup proposed by Anastopoulos and Hu in [1], a setup that's based on standard Newtonian quantized gravity. The quantum measuremen...

Continuing the development of the ZSM-Newton/Coulomb approach to semiclassical Newtonian gravity/electrodynamics [1], we formulate a ZSM-Newton/Coulomb version of the large N approximation scheme proposed by Oriols et al. [2]. We show that this new large N scheme makes it possible to self-consistently describe the center-of-mass evolution of a larg...

This is the first in a two-part series in which we extend non-relativistic stochastic mechanics, in the ZSM formulation [1, 2], to semiclassical Newtonian gravity (ZSM-Newton) and semiclassical Newtonian electrodynamics (ZSM-Coulomb), under the assumption that the gravitational and electromagnetic fields are fundamentally classical (i.e., not indep...

Using as a testbed the recently proposed "gravcat" experimental scheme in [1], we compare the properties of gravitational cat states in three descriptions: (1) canonical quantum theory (CQT) combined with the Newtonian limit of GR, (2) objective collapse theories (OCTs) extended to the regime of semiclassical Newtonian gravity, and (3) OCTs extende...

The "zitterbewegung stochastic mechanics" (ZSM) answer to Wallstrom's criticism, introduced in the companion paper [1], is extended to many particles. We first formulate the many-particle generalization of Nelson-Yasue stochastic mechanics (NYSM), incorporating external and classical interaction potentials. Then we formulate the many-particle gener...

Presentation given at the Fourth International Conference on the Nature and Ontology of Spacetime, organized by the Minkowski Institute and the International Society for the Advanced Study of Spacetime

Seminar talk given for the Utrecht University Foundations of Physics group.

Seminar talk given for the Utrecht Foundations of Physics group.

Wallstrom's criticism of existing formulations of stochastic mechanics is that they fail to derive quantum theory because they require an \emph{ad hoc} quantization condition on the postulated velocity potential, \emph{S}, in order to derive single-valued Schr\"odinger wave functions. We propose an answer to this criticism by modifying the Nelson-Y...

Seminar talk for the University of Nebraska - Lincoln AMO physics group.

We propose a Newtonian theory of semiclassical gravity based on the GRWm collapse theory, which we call GRWmN. The theory essentially amounts to modifying the Schroedinger-Newton (SN) equations of standard semiclassical gravity so that the SN wavefunction undergoes random collapses according to the GRW law. The primary motivation for this theory is...