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Dear Miroljub,
you might also ask in the same way why, if a hydrogen atom in the ground state is a static configuration (as in BM), a gas of such things does not behave like a gas of permanent (though random) dipoles but like a gas of neutral particles. The difference would indeed be massive, and I heard Berge Englert raising this question.

Travis’s answer on the other thread is the standard Bohmian one: All interaction between particles must be via the guiding equation, so they are stripped of all physical characteristics except position. As Aurelien points out this would suggest that you either stick with Coulomb potentials only (hence deny transitions to the ground state), or you include an electromagnetic quantum field in your Hilbert space part, but leave the photons without trajectories.

It is maybe unfair to ask Bohmians about how to incorporate the radiation field. This is not easy for QM either. Certainly no one today can just drop the Coulomb interactions and replace them by a non-perturbatively treated QED field. There has been some good progress in terms of the Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian, like showing tat the ground state of field+atom is really what we think it is, and excited states do decay sending out photons with the right frequency etc. So this might be a reasonable level.

By definition the Bohmians have it all covered, no matter what physicists come up with. In this case: Trace out the photons. They are not real and do not have or need any trajectories.

Best regards, Reinhard

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