Related papers: Moving Mirrors and Thermodynamic Paradoxes
The displacement fluctuations of mirrors in optomechanical devices, induced via thermal expansion by temperature fluctuations due either to thermodynamic fluctuations or to fluctuations in the photon absorption, can be made smaller than…
The standard description of material media in electromagnetism is based on multipoles. It is well known that these moments depend on the point of reference chosen, except for the lowest order. It is shown that this "origin dependence" is…
This article concerns a phenomenon of elementary quantum mechanics that is quite counter-intuitive, very non-classical, and apparently not widely known: a quantum particle can get reflected at a downward potential step. In contrast,…
Accelerating mirrors provide a simple conceptual laboratory for studying particle production and the relation between trajectory and particle, energy, and entropy fluxes. We focus on the relation between energy and entropy, studying some…
Parallel thermal conduction along stochastic magnetic field lines may be reduced because the heat conducting electrons become trapped and detrapped between regions of strong magnetic field (magnetic mirrors). The problem reduces to a simple…
Following Hawking, it is usual to mimic the effect of collapse space-time geometry on quantum fields in a semi-classical approximation by imposing suitable boundary conditions at the origin of coordinates, which effectively becomes a moving…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
The paradoxes of thermodynamics and statistical physics are unavoidable in the study of physical paradoxes because of their importance at the time they came to be as well as the frequency of their appearance in historical studies of…
Originally formulated for macroscopic machines, the laws of thermodynamics were recently shown to hold for quantum systems coupled to ideal sources of work (external classical fields) and heat (systems at equilibrium). Ongoing efforts have…
An asymptotic model based on a reductive perturbative expansion of the drift kinetic and the Maxwell equations is used to demonstrate that, near the instability threshold, the nonlinear dynamics of mirror modes in a magnetized plasma with…
The relationship between a decaying strong turbulence and the mirror instability in a slowly expanding plasma is investigated using two-dimensional hybrid expanding box simulations. We impose an initial ambient magnetic field perpendicular…
This paper models light scattering through flat surfaces with finite transmission, reflection and absorption rates, with wave packets approaching the mirror from both sides. While using the same notion of photons as in free space, our model…
We consider the question raised by Unruh and Wald of whether mirrored boxes can self-accelerate in flat spacetime (the ``self-accelerating box paradox''). From the point of view of the box, which perceives the acceleration as an impressed…
We explore an analogy between the thermodynamics of a free dissipative quantum particle and that of an electromagnetic field between two mirrors of finite conductivity. While a free particle isolated from its environment will effectively be…
We re-analyse the optomechanical interferometer experiment proposed by Marshall, Simon, Penrose and Bouwmeester with the help of a recently developed quantum-classical hybrid theory. This leads to an alternative evaluation of the mirror…
In this paper we ask a common psychological question and provide a physics answer: "Looking into a mirror can one get entangled with one's image?" This is not a frivolous question; rather, it bears on the effect of boundaries on the…
Environment effects on a $n$-dimensional mirror from the strongly coupled d-dimensional quantum critical fields with a dynamic exponent $z$ in weakly squeezed states are studied by the holographic approach. The dual description is a…
We consider the coupling of the electromagnetic vacuum field with an oscillating perfectly-reflecting mirror in the nonrelativistic approximation. As a consequence of the frequency modulation associated to the motion of the mirror, low…
We analyze the flow of energy and entropy emitted by a class of moving mirror trajectories which provide models for the radiation fields produced by black hole evaporation. The mirror radiation fields provide natural, concrete examples of…
The actual value of the quantum vacuum energy density is generally regarded as irrelevant in non-gravitational physics. However, this paper gives a non-gravitational system where this value does have physical significance. The system is a…