Related papers: Giulio Racah and Theoretical Physics in Jerusalem
Group Theory has become an invaluable tool in the physics community. Despite numerous introductory books, the subject remains challenging for beginners. Mathematica has emerged as a popular tool for research and education, offering various…
The Ihara limit (or -constant) $A(q)$ has been a central problem of study in the asymptotic theory of global function fields (or equivalently, algebraic curves over finite fields). It addresses global function fields with many rational…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
The Bannai-Ito algebra is presented together with some of its applications. Its relations with the Bannai-Ito polynomials, the Racah problem for the $sl_{-1}(2)$ algebra, a superintegrable model with reflections and a Dirac-Dunkl equation…
A century ago, nuclear physics entered astrophysics, giving birth to a new field of science referred to as "Nuclear Astrophysics". With time, it developed at an impressive pace into a vastly inter- and multidisciplinary discipline bringing…
I will discuss how the concept of basho, introduced by Nishida Kitaro nearly a century ago, can give an interesting insight to understand the concept of a point in modern quantum gravity. A quantum spacetime, necessary for the quantization…
Since it was first applied to the study of nuclear interactions by Wigner and Dyson, almost 60 years ago, Random Matrix Theory (RMT) has developed into a field of its own within applied mathematics, and is now essential to many parts of…
The Racah algebra and its higher rank extension are the algebras underlying the univariate and multivariate Racah polynomials. In this paper we develop two new models in which the Racah algebra naturally arises as symmetry algebra, namely…
The discovery of atomic nucleus by E. Rutherford, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the Nuclear Physics original landmark. From then, a series of experiments in which beams of particles composed of neutrons, protons and others,…
In this article, the ray tracing method is studied beyond the classical geometrical theory. The trajectories are here regarded as geodesics in a Riemannian manifold, whose metric and topological properties are those induced by the…
Using the representation theory of sl(2) and an appropriate model for tensor product of lowest weight Verma modules, we give a realisation first of the Hahn algebra, and then of the Racah algebra, using Jacobi differential operators. While…
Since the mid-1920s, different strands of research used stars as "physics laboratories" for investigating the nature of matter under extreme densities and pressures, impossible to realize on Earth. To trace this process this paper is…
The origin of quantum physics was the discovery of the base unit of electromagnetic action $h$ by Max Planck in 1900 when he analyzed the experimental results of the black body radiation. This permitted Albert Einstein a few years later to…
In 1927, just after he obtained a full professorship, Enrico Fermi delivered his first course on Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics in Rome. The following year Edoardo Amaldi, Emilio Segre' and Ettore Majorana became students…
Under ray-optical light transport, the classical ray serves as a linear and local "point query" of light's behaviour. Linearity and locality are crucial to the formulation of sophisticated path tracing and sampling techniques, that enable…
This text offers reminiscences of my personal interactions with Roman Jackiw as a way of looking back at the very fertile period in theoretical physics in the last quarter of the 20th century.
In the spirit of the Schur-Weyl duality, we study the connections between the Racah algebra and the centralizers of tensor products of three (possibly different) irreducible representations of su(2). As a first step we show that the Racah…
We determine the Lorentz transformations and the kinematic content and dynamical framework of special relativity as purely an extension of Galileo's thoughts. No reference to light is ever required: The theories of relativity are logically…
The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…
Continuing professional development for teachers in the physical sciences is crucial to maintaining high-quality instruction, especially when addressing modern physics. Nevertheless, the teaching of these topics often relies on theoretical…