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Related papers: Fermat's Principle in General Relativity via Hergl…

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The analogy between dynamics and optics had a great influence on the development of the foundations of classical and quantum mechanics. We take this analogy one step further and investigate the validity of Fermat's principle in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-10-14 Tarek A. Elsayed

Mimicking the description of spinning particles in General Relativity, the Fermat Principle is extended to spinning photons. Linearization of the resulting Papapetrou-Souriau type equations yields the semiclassical model used recently to…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2009-11-11 C. Duval , Z. Horvathy , P. A. Horvathy

We present an alternative nonconservative gravitational theory based on the Herglotz variational principle in a fully covariant form. The present model may be seen as an improvement of the theory proposed in Ref. [Lazo et al, Phys. Rev. D…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2022-06-22 Juilson A. P. Paiva , Matheus J. Lazo , Vilson T. Zanchin

Fermat's principle and variational analysis is used to analyze the trajectories of light propagating in a radially inhomogeneous medium with a singularity in the center. It is found that the light trajectories are similar to those around a…

Physics Education · Physics 2009-11-07 M. Marklund , D. Anderson , F. Cattani , M. Lisak , L. Lundgren

The present work shows that through a suitable change of variables relativistic dynamics can be mapped to light propagation in a non-homogeneous medium. A particle's trajectory through the modified space-time is thus formally equivalent to…

Optics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. B. Almeida

We start with formulation of the generalized Fermat's principle for light propagation in a curved spacetime. We apply Pontryagin's minimum principle of the optimal control theory and obtain an effective Hamiltonian for null geodesics in a…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2015-06-16 Valeri P. Frolov

The Lorentz covariant theory of propagation of light in the (weak) gravitational fields of N-body systems consisting of arbitrarily moving point-like bodies with constant masses is constructed. The theory is based on the Lienard-Wiechert…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2008-11-26 Sergei M. Kopeikin , Gerhard Schafer

We apply Perlick's (1990a) rigorous formulation of the Fermat principle in arbitrary spacetimes to prove the correctness of the description of gravitational lensing by gravitational waves, given in the literature using the scalar and vector…

Astrophysics · Physics 2011-07-19 Valerio Faraoni

In this paper we use a general version of Fermat's principle for light rays in General Relativity and a curve shortening method to write the Morse relations for light rays joining an event with a smooth timelike curve in a Lorentzian…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Fabio Giannoni , Antonio Masiello , Paolo Piccione

The images of many distant galaxies are displaced, distorted and often multiplied by the presence of foreground massive galaxies near the line of sight; the foreground galaxies act as gravitational lenses. Commonly, the lens equation, which…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-11-07 Simonetta Frittelli , Thomas P. Kling , Ezra T. Newman

The Fermat principle is advocated to be a convenient tool to analyze the light propagation in a curved space time. It is shown that in the weak deflection regime the light ray trajectories can be systematically described by applying the…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2025-04-03 Joanna Piwnik , Joanna Gonera , Piotr Kosinski

We present a framework, based on the null-surface formulation of general relativity, for discussing the dynamics of Fermat potentials for gravitational lensing in a generic situation without approximations of any kind. Additionally, we…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2009-11-07 Simonetta Frittelli , Ezra T. Newman

Special relativity beyond its basic treatment can be inaccessible, in particular because introductory physics courses typically view special relativity as decontextualized from the rest of physics. We seek to place special relativity back…

Classical Physics · Physics 2026-04-14 Gerd Wagner , Matthew W. Guthrie

The Fermat principle indicates that light chooses the temporally shortest path. The action for this "motion" is the observed time, and it has no Lorentz invariance. In this paper we show how this action can be obtained from relativistic…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Naohisa Ogawa

The Lagrangian formalism on a arbitrary non-fibrating manifold is considered. The kinematical description of this generic situation is based on the concept of (higher-order) Grassmann manifolds which is the factorization of the regular…

dg-ga · Mathematics 2008-02-03 Dan Radu Grigore

We postulate the applicability of the general form-invariance principle in special relativity. It is shown that this principle holds in classical mechanics. Some examples of transformations between the reference frames which satisfy this…

General Physics · Physics 2011-08-18 Vitaliy Voytik

This paper presents a survey of the Fermat principle within the framework of general relativity, tracing its evolution from classical optics to its modern variational formulation in Lorentzian geometry. In particular, we provide its proof…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-05-05 Erasmo Caponio , Miguel Angel Javaloyes

The non-conservation of the energy-momentum tensor in $f(R,T)$ gravity can be interpreted as an effective manifestation of dissipation. Motivated by this, we propose a new formulation of $f(R,T)$ gravity based on the Herglotz variational…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-03-20 Marek Wazny , Lehel Csillag , Miguel A. S. Pinto , Tiberiu Harko

The present article introduces a generalization of the (multisymplectic) Hamiltonian field theory for a Lagrangian density, allowing the formulation of this kind of field theories for variational problem of more general nature than those…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-09-15 Guadalupe Quijón , Santiago Capriotti

The goal of this contribution is to introduce the Hamiltonian formalism of theoretical mechanics for analysing motion in generic linear and non-linear dynamical systems, including particle accelerators. This framework allows the derivation…

Accelerator Physics · Physics 2024-02-27 Yannis Papaphilippou
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