A mathematician's approach to general relativistic quantum mechanics
Speaker
Prof. S. Tahvildar-Zadeh
Affiliation
Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey
Title of talk
A mathematician's approach to general relativistic quantum mechanics
«رهیافت یک ریاضی دان به مکانیک کوانتمی سازگار با نسبیت عام»
Abstract
I will describe a mathematical approach to the problem of
incorporating relativistic gravity into quantum mechanics. In this
approach, particles are identified with certain joint singularities of
the space-time and the electromagnetic field, whose motion --which cannot
be dictated by the field equations themselves-- is instead guided by a
quantum mechanical wave function defined on the particle configuration
space. I will illustrate this point of view by re-examining the
one-body Dirac equation for the electron in a Hydrogen atom (in
Born-Oppenheimer approximation) and look at a few different ways of
overcoming the main difficulty (already present at the classical level)
in incorporating gravity into the picture, namely the problem of the
infinite self-energy of point charges in Maxwell-Lorentz
electrodynamics. I will conclude by briefly remarking on a
corresponding many-body theory of electromagnetically interacting
particles
This is a joint project with Michael Kiessling
