Status of Relativistic Bohmian Mechanics: What Open Questions Remain?

[Morberticus]

I am curious about recent progress in relativistic Bohmian mechanics. Finding a review is proving difficult (The closest I can find is a conference paper by H. Nikolic).

My understanding is a set of dynamical variables are identified as "real" (beables), and their (usually deterministic) time-evolution is obtained by decomposing the Schrödinger equation. But there seems to be some tension (at least there was in 2005) between Bohmian Mechanics and QFT insofar as what you label as "real" depends on what you want to calculate, and decomposition in a fermionic field theory suggests a different reality than in a bosonic field theory.

My question is, is there a single set of "beables" that consistently obtains both non-relativistic QM (including quantum computing) and the standard model of particle physics? Is this still an avenue of research?

 

[atyy]

I think one possibility is to try to obtain the entire standard model from non-relativistic physics, for example a lattice model whose spacing is so fine that the violation of Lorentz invariance is less than what is observed. 't Hooft begins his exposition of QFT this way http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/lectures/basisqft.pdf. Another possibility for obtaining some aspects of the standard model from a non-relativistic model is http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507118.

I think the chief difficulty with putting the standard model on a lattice is whether chiral interactions can be described http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.2560.

 

[Demystifier]

One possibility is that particles are ontological for both bosons and fermions in QFT:
http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1205.1992

But this is not the only possibility, and the research is still ongoing.

 

[bohm2]

Other than Demystifier's papers include the following (the first paper just published today):

Relativistic Bohmian mechanics without a preferred foliation
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03463.pdf

Can Bohmian mechanics be made relativistic?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.1714v2.pdf

Can Bohmian Mechanics Be Made Background Independent?
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11653/1/BIBM.pdf