Related papers: Wigner Rotations in Laser Cavities
Special relativity is foundation of many branches of modern physics, of which theoretical results are far beyond our daily experience and hard to realized in kinematic experiments. However, its outcomes could be demonstrated by making use…
This paper describes a particularly didactic and transparent derivation of basic properties of the Lorentz group. The generators for rotations and boosts along an arbitrary direction, as well as their commutation relations, are written as…
We show that relativistic rotation transformations represent transfer maps between the laboratory system and a local observer on an observer manifold, rather than an event manifold, in the spirit of C-equivalence. Rotation is, therefore,…
It is known that a gas of electrons in a uniform neutralizing background can crystallize and form a lattice if the electron density is less than a critical value. This crystallization may have two- or three-dimensional structure. Since the…
The effect of the relativistic spin rotation, conditioned by the setting of the spin in the rest frame of a particle and by the noncommutativity of the Lorentz transformations along noncolinear directions, is discussed. In connection with…
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…
While the Lorentz group serves as the basic language for Einstein's special theory of relativity, it is turning out to be the basic mathematical instrument in optical sciences, particularly in ray optics and polarization optics. The beam…
Laboratory optics, typically dealing with monochromatic light beams in a single reference frame, exhibits numerous spin-orbit interaction phenomena due to the coupling between the spin and orbital degrees of freedom of light. Similar…
The ordered addition of two Lorentz boosts is normally shown to result in a boost by utilizing concepts from group theory and non-Euclidian geometry. We present a method for achieving this addition by performing a sequence of spatial…
The rotating frame is considered in quantum mechanics on the basis of the position dependent boost relating this frame to the non rotating inertial frame. We derive the Sagnac phase shift and the spin coupling with the rotation in the non…
We show that Lorentz invariance is realized nontrivially in the classical action of a massless spin-$\frac12$ particle with definite helicity. We find that the ordinary Lorentz transformation is modified by a shift orthogonal to the boost…
Analogous to the famous Euler angle parametrization in three-dimensional Euclidean space, a reflection-free Lorentz transformation in (2+1)-dimensional Minkowski space can be decomposed into three simple parts. Applying this decomposition…
We study the structure of maps that Lorentz boosts induce on the spin degree of freedom of a system consisting of two massive spin-$1/2$ particles. We consider the case where the spin state is described by the Werner state and the momenta…
In this paper we introduce a proposal for the kinematics of bodies in uniform circular motion. This model could contribute for the explanation of the two main problems of contemporary cosmology: dark matter and dark energy. We use one of…
The purpose of this paper is to provide an elementary introduction to the qualitative and quantitative results of velocity combination in special relativity, including the Wigner rotation and Thomas precession. We utilize only the most…
We investigate the Wigner rotation for photons, which governs the change in the polarization of the photon as it propagates through an arbitrary gravitational field. We give explicit examples in Schwarzschild spacetime, and compare with the…
The general theory of relativity (GR) is symmetric under smooth coordinate transformations, also known as diffeomorphisms. The general coordinate transformation group has a linear subgroup denoted as the Lorentz group of symmetry, which is…
It is shown that the Lorentz group plays prominent roles in at least two areas in condensed matter physics, namely in the Bogoliubov transformation and optical filters. It is pointed out that the underlying symmetry of the Bogoliubov…
We investigate how a uniformly rotating frame is defined as the rest frame of an observer rotating with constant angular velocity $\Omega$ around the $z$ axis of an inertial frame. Assuming that this frame is a Lorentz one, we second…
Einstein-aether theory is extended by allowing for spinning degrees of freedom of the aether. In addition to the acceleration, shear, expansion, and vorticity of the aether velocity field, a spin rotation describing the dynamics of a…