Overlaps in pilot wave field theories

Abstract

Recently doubts have been raised about the ability of pilot wave theories with field ontology to recover the predictions of quantum field theory. In particular, Struyve has questioned that the overlap between wave functionals of macroscopically different states with fixed particle number is really non-significant. With numerical computations and some further plausibility arguments we show that the overlap between n-particle states in field theory decreases almost exponentially with the number of particles and becomes non-significant already for small particle numbers.