Related papers: Eugene Paul Wigner's Nobel Prize
The last particle that completes the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, the most sophisticated theory of nature in human history, was discovered in 2012. Although the present formulation of the theory comes from the 1960s and 70s, it…
The breadth of Eugene Wigner's interests and contributions is amazing and humbling. At different times in his life he did seminal work in areas as diverse as pure mathematics and chemical engineering. His seminal research in physics is, of…
Einstein's $E = mc^{2}$ unifies the momentum-energy relations for massive and massless particles. According to Wigner, the internal space-time symmetries of massive and massless particles are isomorphic to $O(3)$ and $E(2)$ respectively.…
The last Nobel Prize of the Millenium in Physics has been awarded jointly to Professor Gerardus 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in Holland and his thesis advisor Professor Emeritus Martinus J.G. Veltman of Holland. According to the…
According to Eugene Wigner, quantum mechanics is a physics of Fourier transformations, and special relativity is a physics of Lorentz transformations. Since two-by-two matrices with unit determinant form the group SL(2,c) which acts as the…
The internal space-time symmetries of relativistic particles are dictated by Wigner's little groups. The $O(3)$-like little group for a massive particle at rest and the $E(2)$-like little group of a massless particle are two different…
Professor Tom Kibble was an internationally-renowned theoretical physicist whose contributions to theoretical physics range from the theory of elementary particles to modern early-universe cosmology. The unifying theme behind all his work…
The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…
Einstein's photo-electric effect allows us to regard electromagnetic waves as massless particles. Then, how is the photon helicity translated into the electric and magnetic fields perpendicular to the direction of propagation? This is an…
According to Richard Feynman, the adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing. It is therefore interesting to combine some, if…
This note summarizes the physics and mathematics of Lorentz transformations for massless particles, specifically for photons. We provide a complete analytical derivation of Wigner's little group matrix and a closed formula for the…
Using the remarkable mathematical construct of Eugene Wigner to visualize quantum trajectories in phase space, quantum processes can be described in terms of a quasi-probability distribution analogous to the phase space probability…
The notion of Wigner particles is attached to irreducible unitary representations of the Poincare group, characterized by parameters m and s of mass and spin, respectively. However, the Lorentz symmetry is broken in theories with long-range…
Henri Poincar\'e formulated the mathematics of the Lorentz transformations, known as the Poincar\'e group. He also formulated the Poincar\'e sphere for polarization optics. It is noted that his sphere contains the symmetry of the Lorentz…
It has been almost one hundred years since Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in 1905. He showed that the basic space-time symmetry is dictated by the Lorentz group. It is shown that this group of Lorentz transformations…
Starting with the Chern-Simons formulation of (2+1)-dimensional gravity we show that the gravitational interactions deform the Poincare symmetry of flat space-time to a quantum group symmetry. The relevant quantum group is the quantum…
In 1971, Feynman et al. published a paper on hadronic mass spectra and transition rates based on the quark model. Their starting point was a Lorentz-invariant differential equation. This equation can be separated into a Klein-Gordon…
The particle recently discovered by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN is almost certainly a Higgs boson, fulfilling a quest that can be traced back to three seminal high energy papers of 1964, but which is intimately connected to…
Dealing with Eugene Wigner's ideas on the measurement procedure in quantum physics and unearthing the controversy that pitted him against supporters of the interpretation of complementarity, I will show how Wigner and his followers…
In 1887 Voigt published a paper dedicated to the Doppler effect in which he demanded form invariance to the wave equation in inertial frames and obtained a set of spacetime transformations now known as the Voigt transformations. In 1905…