Completeness for a single particle

jk22
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Another argument than EPR that quantum mechanics were not complete by Einstein is the following : suppose a single electron passing through a hole and going further to a spherical detector. Quantum mechanics describes this as a wavefunction fulling the whole space inside the sphere and then collapsing to a single point on the screen.

The question was in this description which process forbids that the wavefunction collapses in two points ? There should be an instantaneous interaction ?
 
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Detecting the electron at two points is forbidden by conservation of electric charge. If it were a photon, then it's more complicated, but the detected photons would have to have energies that added up to that of the original photon.
 
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For photons It is simply solved by quantum field theory ?
 
jk22 said:
For photons It is simply solved by quantum field theory ?

Yes, the typical QM thought experiments ignore self-interactions and assume the particle will only interact with a screens, filters, or the detectors. If you use QFT you can consistently treat all of the other possible interactions at the risk of making things very complicated. But the amplitudes by construction satisfy the ordinary QM rules.
 
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Insights auto threads is broken atm, so I'm manually creating these for new Insight articles. Towards the end of the first lecture for the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Olivia Lanes (Global Lead, Content and Education IBM) stated... Source: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/quantum-entanglement-is-a-kinematic-fact-not-a-dynamical-effect/ by @RUTA
If we release an electron around a positively charged sphere, the initial state of electron is a linear combination of Hydrogen-like states. According to quantum mechanics, evolution of time would not change this initial state because the potential is time independent. However, classically we expect the electron to collide with the sphere. So, it seems that the quantum and classics predict different behaviours!
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