How the result of a measurement of a photon's mass can turn out to be 100

Abstract

Bohmian mechanics has garnered significant attention as an interpretation of quantum theory since the paradigmatic experiments by Kocsis et. al. [Science 332, 6034 (2011)] and Mahler et. al. [Sci. Adv. 2, 2 (2016)], which inferred the average trajectories of photons in the nonrelativistic regime. These experiments were largely motivated by Wiseman's formulation of Bohmian mechanics, which grounded these trajectories in weak measurements. Recently, Wiseman's framework was extended to the relativistic regime by expressing the velocity field of single photons in terms of weak values of the photon energy and momentum. Here, we propose an operational, weak value-based definition for the Bohmian "local mass" of relativistic single particles. For relativistic wavefunctions satisfying the scalar Klein-Gordon equation, this mass coincides with the effective mass defined by de Broglie in his relativistic pilot-wave theory, a quantity closely connected with the quantum potential that is responsible for Bohmian trajectory self-bending and the anomalous photoelectric effect. We demonstrate the relationship between the photon trajectories and the mass in an interferometric setup.