Stein’s method and approximating the quantum harmonic oscillator

Hall et al. [Phys. Rev. X 4 (2014) 041013] recently proposed that quantum theory can be understood as the continuum limit of a deterministic theory in which there is a large, but finite, number of classical “worlds.” A resulting Gaussian limit theorem for particle positions in the ground state, agreeing with quantum theory, was conjectured in Hall et al. [Phys. Rev. X 4 (2014) 041013] and proven by McKeague and Levin [Ann. Appl. Probab. 26 (2016) 2540–2555] using Stein’s method. In this article we show how quantum position probability densities for higher energy levels beyond the ground state may arise as distributional fixed points in a new generalization of Stein’s method. These are then used to obtain a rate of distributional convergence for conjectured particle positions in the first energy level above the ground state to the (two-sided) Maxwell distribution; new techniques must be developed for this setting where the usual “density approach” Stein solution (see Chatterjee and Shao [Ann. Appl. Probab. 21 (2011) 464–483] has a singularity.