Paper detail

Statistical and strict momentum conservation

Arguments about the conservation laws of energy and momentum in the micro-world being statistical or strict began in 1924, and conflicting viewpoints remain today. The former is mainly supported theoretically, but the latter has been proved by many experiments. Here we explain that in principle, the strict conservation law of momentum always holds in the entangled state form of the momentum eigenstates of a closed composite system with interactions among subsystems, by expanding the total wave function to the sum of the products of momentum eigenstates of subsystems. Common scenario is that one of the two subsystems of a composite system is large or strong, its state remains approximately unchanged in a short time and the entangled state can be approximately written as a product state, which can be easily deduced from the paper of Haroche's group in 2001. The considered micro-subsystem can be approximately represented as the superposition of its different momentum eigenstates; therefore, the approximation can be used to explain why the law holds statistically for the subsystem and for any single particle due to neglecting the interactions with the large subsystem or the environment. So the two momentum conservation laws reasonably hold without conflicts.