Quantum stresses in the hydrogen atom

Abstract

Gravitational form factors are often interpreted as providing access to stresses inside hadrons, in particular through Fourier transforms of the form factors $D$ and $\bar{c}$. Some researchers, however, have expressed skepticism of this interpretation. I revisit the question, and argue that it is indeed appropriate to interpret these quantities as stress distributions. I consider the hydrogen atom's ground state as a familiar example, and use the pilot wave interpretation of quantum mechanics to give the distributions a clear meaning. A striking result is that $\bar{c}$ -- rather than $D$ -- quantifies the force law binding the system, which can be understood through Cauchy's first law of motion.

17 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (16)

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Gravitational form factor $D$ of charmonium from shear stress
• Mechanical form factors and densities of non-relativistic fermions
• Momentum Flow Mechanisms and Color-Lorentz Forces on Quarks in the Nucleon
• Scale-anomaly-induced binding pressure in hadrons
• Quantum stress and torsion distributions in the deuteron
• Energy-momentum tensor form factors and spin density distribution in the nucleon calculated in a quantized Skyrme model with vector mesons
• The energy-momentum tensor in a classical model of the electron