Related papers: Wigner Rotations in Laser Cavities
It is possible to associate two angles with two successive non-collinear Lorentz boosts. If one boost is applied after the initial boost, the result is the final boost preceded by a rotation called the Wigner rotation. The other rotation is…
It is well known that a sequence of two non-collinear pure Lorentz transformations (boosts) is not a boost again, but involves a spatial rotation, the Wigner or Thomas-Wigner rotation. The formation of this rotation is visually illustrated…
In this work we analyze the amount of entanglement associated with the spin and momentum degrees of freedom of a single massive spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particle from a relativistic perspective. The effect of a Lorentz boost introduces a Wigner…
Wigner rotations are transformations that affect spinning particles and cause the observable phenomenon of Thomas precession. Here we study these rotations for arbitrary symmetry groups with a semi-direct product structure. In particular we…
A relativistic particle undergoing successive boosts which are non collinear will experience a rotation of its coordinate axes with respect to the boosted frame. This rotation of coordinate axes is caused by a relativistic phenomenon called…
Because of its apparent complexity, the discussion of Wigner rotation is usually reduced to the study of Thomas precession, which is too specific a case to allow a deep understanding of boost composition. However, by simple arguments and…
The Thomas--Wigner rotation (TWR) results from the fact that a combination of boosts leads to a non-trivial rotation of a physical system. Its origin lies in the structure of the Lorentz group. In this article we discuss the idea that the…
We develop a relativistic velocity space called \emph{rapidity space} from the single assumption of Lorentz invariance, and use it to visualize and calculate effects resulting from the successive application of non-colinear Lorentz boosts.…
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 standard expression for the Wigner rotation leads to incorrect result for the wavefront rotation. The results for the Wigner rotation in the Lorentz lab frame obtained by many experts on special relativity such as Moeller and Jackson,…
In order to generalize the relativistic notion of boost to the case of non inertial particles and to general relativity, we come back to the definition of Lie group of Lorentz matrices and its Lie algebra and we study how this group acts on…
We investigate the effects of the repeated application of Lorentz-boosts to the four momentum of a photon in the transverse direction and observe that this can take us to a reference frame in which the direction of the photon's momentum is…
It is shown that a general model for particle detection in combination with a linear application of the Wigner rotations, which correspond to momentum-dependent changes of the particle spin under Lorentz transformations, to the state of a…
A result from particle tracking states that, after a microbunched electron beam is kicked, its trajectory changes while the orientation of the microbunching wavefront remains as before. Experiments at the LCLS showed that radiation in the…
It was shown that in the small Wigner group there is a one-parameter subgroup of the Lorentz transformations, which leave unchanged not only the momentum of the fermion with spin h/2, but also its spin characteristics. This is the group of…
Herein we shall consider Lorentz boosts and Wigner rotations from a (complexified) quaternionic point of view. We shall demonstrate that for a suitably defined self-adjoint complex quaternionic 4-velocity, pure Lorentz boosts can be phrased…
We investigate the rotation of the polarization of a light ray propagating in the gravitational field of a circularly polarized laser beam. The rotation consists of a reciprocal part due to gravitational optical activity, and a…
Wigner's little groups are the subgroups of the Lorentz group whose transformations leave the momentum of a given particle invariant. They thus define the internal space-time symmetries of relativistic particles. These symmetries take…
Wigner rotations and Iwasawa decompositions are manifestations of the internal space-time symmetries of massive and massless particles, respectively. It is shown to be possible to produce combinations of optical filters which exhibit…
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…