Related papers: Rotations associated with Lorentz boosts
The Wigner rotation is a key word in many branches of physics, chemistry and engineering sciences. It is a group theoretical effect resulting from two Lorentz boosts. The net effect is one boost followed or preceded by a rotation. This…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The article shows how the factorization of an arbitrary Lorentz transformation is performed. That is, representation of an arbitrary Lorentz transformation as a sequence of spatial rotation and boost or boost and spatial rotation. Relations…
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…
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…
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 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…
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,…
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 provide transformation matrices for arbitrary Lorentz transformations of multidimensional Hermite functions in any dimension. These serve as a valuable tool for analyzing spacetime properties of MHS fields, and aid in the description of…
The Inonu-Wigner contraction is applied to special relativity and the little groups of the Lorentz group. If the O(3) symmetry group for massive particle is boosted to an infinite-momentum frame, it becomes contracted to a combination of…
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…
Lorentz boosts are squeeze transformations. While these transformations are similar to those in squeezed states of light, they are fundamentally different from both physical and mathematical points of view. The difference is illustrated in…
We point out, by exhibiting two examples and mentioning a third one, that it is sometimes useful to consider Lorentz transformations as generated from hyperplane or line reflections. One example concerns the construction of boosts linking…
Given standard angular momentum and boost matrices, the commutation rules for vector and momentum matrices are solved. The resulting matrix components are displayed as detailed functions of spin with factors such as the square root of…
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…