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Books > Science & Mathematics > Physics > Quantum physics (quantum mechanics) > General
The first part of this third volume of Wigner's Collected Works is devoted to his analysis of symmetries in quantum mechanics, of the relativistic wave equations, of relativistic particle theory, and of field theory. It is introduced by the masterly annotation of Arthur S. Wightman. Abner Shimony annotates the second part where the reader will find Wigner's contributions to the foundations of quantum physics and to the problems of measurement.
Terahertz (THz) radiation with frequencies between 100 GHz and 30 THz has developed into an important tool of science and technology, with numerous applications in materials characterization, imaging, sensor technologies, and telecommunications. Recent progress in THz generation has provided ultrashort THz pulses with electric field amplitudes of up to several megavolts/cm. This development opens the new research field of nonlinear THz spectroscopy in which strong light-matter interactions are exploited to induce quantum excitations and/or charge transport and follow their nonequilibrium dynamics in time-resolved experiments. This book introduces methods of THz generation and nonlinear THz spectroscopy in a tutorial way, discusses the relevant theoretical concepts, and presents prototypical, experimental, and theoretical results in condensed matter physics. The potential of nonlinear THz spectroscopy is illustrated by recent research, including an overview of the relevant literature.
This thesis reports on experiments in which the motion of a mechanical oscillator is measured with unprecedented precision. The position fluctuations of the oscillator-a glass nanostring-are measured with an imprecision that is sufficient to resolve its quantum zero-point motion within its thermal decoherence time. The concomitant observation of measurement back-action, in accordance with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, verifies the principles of linear quantum measurements on a macroscopic mechanical object. The record of the measurement is used to perform feedback control so as to suppress both classical thermal motion and quantum measurement back-action. These results verify some of the central and long-standing predictions of quantum measurement theory applied to a macroscopic object. The act of measurement not only perturbs the subject of the measurement-the mechanical oscillator-but also changes the state of the light used to make the measurement. This prediction is verified by demonstrating that the optical field, after having interacted with the mechanical oscillator, contains quantum correlations that render its quadrature fluctuations smaller than those of the vacuum - i.e., the light is squeezed. Lastly, the thesis reports on some of the first feedback control experiments involving macroscopic objects in the quantum regime, together with an exploration of the quantum limit of feedback control. The book offers a pedagogical account of linear measurement theory, its realization via optical interferometry, and contains a detailed guide to precision optical interferometry..
This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems.
This fifteenth volume of the Poincare Seminar Series, Dirac Matter, describes the surprising resurgence, as a low-energy effective theory of conducting electrons in many condensed matter systems, including graphene and topological insulators, of the famous equation originally invented by P.A.M. Dirac for relativistic quantum mechanics. In five highly pedagogical articles, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience, this book explains why Dirac matters. Highlights include the detailed "Graphene and Relativistic Quantum Physics", written by the experimental pioneer, Philip Kim, and devoted to graphene, a form of carbon crystallized in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice, from its discovery in 2004-2005 by the future Nobel prize winners Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim to the so-called relativistic quantum Hall effect; the review entitled "Dirac Fermions in Condensed Matter and Beyond", written by two prominent theoreticians, Mark Goerbig and Gilles Montambaux, who consider many other materials than graphene, collectively known as "Dirac matter", and offer a thorough description of the merging transition of Dirac cones that occurs in the energy spectrum, in various experiments involving stretching of the microscopic hexagonal lattice; the third contribution, entitled "Quantum Transport in Graphene: Impurity Scattering as a Probe of the Dirac Spectrum", given by Helene Bouchiat, a leading experimentalist in mesoscopic physics, with Sophie Gueron and Chuan Li, shows how measuring electrical transport, in particular magneto-transport in real graphene devices - contaminated by impurities and hence exhibiting a diffusive regime - allows one to deeply probe the Dirac nature of electrons. The last two contributions focus on topological insulators; in the authoritative "Experimental Signatures of Topological Insulators", Laurent Levy reviews recent experimental progress in the physics of mercury-telluride samples under strain, which demonstrates that the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator hosts a two-dimensional massless Dirac metal; the illuminating final contribution by David Carpentier, entitled "Topology of Bands in Solids: From Insulators to Dirac Matter", provides a geometric description of Bloch wave functions in terms of Berry phases and parallel transport, and of their topological classification in terms of invariants such as Chern numbers, and ends with a perspective on three-dimensional semi-metals as described by the Weyl equation. This book will be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and historians of science.
This text builds a solid introduction to the concepts and techniques of quantum mechanics in settings where the phenomena treated are sufficiently simple that the student does not face two fundamental difficulties simultaneously: viz, that of learning quantum mechanics and that of learning how to assess the validity of models or the reliability of approximations. The treatment thus confines itself to systems that can either be solved exactly or be handled by well-controlled, plausible approximations. With few exceptions, this means systems with a small number of degrees of freedom. The exceptions are a first pass at many-electron atoms, the electromagnetic field, and the Dirac equation. (The inclusion of these last two topics reflects the now widely-held belief that every physicist should have at least a nodding acquaintance with these cornerstones of modern physics.) Born in Vienna, Kurt Gottfried emigrated to Canada in 1939 and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT in 1955. He is professor of physics at Cornell University, and had previously been at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at CERN in Geneva. He is the co-author of Concepts of Particle Physics (with V.F. Weisskopf), and of The Fallacy of Star Wars and Crisis, Stability, and Nuclear War. Gottfried has an active interest in arms control and human rights and is a founder and currently the Chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
In this monograph, we shall present a new mathematical formulation of quantum theory, clarify a number of discrepancies within the prior formulation of quantum theory, give new applications to experiments in physics, and extend the realm of application of quantum theory well beyond physics. Here, we motivate this new formulation and sketch how it developed. Since the publication of Dirac's famous book on quantum mechanics [Dirac, 1930] and von Neumann's classic text on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics two years later [von Neumann, 1932], there have appeared a number of lines of development, the intent of each being to enrich quantum theory by extra polating or even modifying the original basic structure. These lines of development have seemed to go in different directions, the major directions of which are identified here: First is the introduction of group theoretical methods [Weyl, 1928; Wigner, 1931] with the natural extension to coherent state theory [Klauder and Sudarshan, 1968; Peremolov, 1971]. The call for an axiomatic approach to physics [Hilbert, 1900; Sixth Problem] led to the development of quantum logic [Mackey, 1963; Jauch, 1968; Varadarajan, 1968, 1970; Piron, 1976; Beltrametti & Cassinelli, 1981], to the creation of the operational approach [Ludwig, 1983-85, 1985; Davies, 1976] with its application to quantum communication theory [Helstrom, 1976; Holevo, 1982), and to the development of the C* approach [Emch, 1972]. An approach through stochastic differential equations ("stochastic mechanics") was developed [Nelson, 1964, 1966, 1967].
This thesis presents results crucial to the emerging field of indirect excitons. These specially designed quasiparticles give the unique opportunity to study fundamental properties of quantum degenerate Bose gases in semiconductors. Furthermore, indirect excitons allow for the creation of novel optoelectronic devices where excitons are used in place of electrons. Excitonic devices are explored for the development of advanced signal processing seamlessly coupled with optical communication. The thesis presents and describes the author's imaging experiments that led to the discovery of spin transport of excitons. The many firsts presented herein include the first studies of an excitonic conveyer, leading to the discovery of the dynamical localization-delocalization transition for excitons, and the first excitonic ramp and excitonic diode with no energy-dissipating voltage gradient.
This book describes a broad research program on quantum communication. Here, a cryptographic key is exchanged by two parties using quantum states of light and the security of the system arises from the fundamental properties of quantum mechanics. The author developed new communication protocols using high-dimensional quantum states so that more than one classical bit is transferred by each photon. This approach helps circumvent some of the non-ideal properties of the experimental system, enabling record key rates on metropolitan distance scales. Another important aspect of the work is the encoding of the key on high-dimensional phase-randomized weak coherent states, combined with so-called decoy states to thwart a class of possible attacks on the system. The experiments are backed up by a rigorous security analysis of the system, which accounts for all known device non-idealities. The author goes on to demonstrate a scalable approach for increasing the dimension of the quantum states, and considers attacks on the system that use optimal quantum cloning techniques. This thesis captures the current state-of-the-art of the field of quantum communication in laboratory systems, and demonstrates that phase-randomized weak coherent states have application beyond quantum communication.
This book describes the subject of electrodynamics at classical as well as quantum level, developed as an interaction at a distance. Thus it has electric charges interacting with one another directly and not through the medium of a field. In general such an interaction travels forward and backward in time symmetrically, thus apparently violating the principle of causality. It turns out, however, that in such a description the cosmological boundary conditions become very important. The theory therefore works only in a cosmology with the right boundary conditions; but when it does work it is free from the divergences that plague a quantum field theory.
This book describes the subject of electrodynamics at classical as well as quantum level, developed as an interaction at a distance. Thus it has electric charges interacting with one another directly and not through the medium of a field. In general such an interaction travels forward and backward in time symmetrically, thus apparently violating the principle of causality. It turns out, however, that in such a description the cosmological boundary conditions become very important. The theory therefore works only in a cosmology with the right boundary conditions; but when it does work it is free from the divergences that plague a quantum field theory.
This thesis discusses in detail the measurement of the polarizations of all S-wave vector quarkonium states in LHC proton-proton collisions with the CMS detector. Heavy quarkonium states constitute an ideal laboratory to study non-perturbative effects of quantum chromodynamics and to understand how quarks bind into hadrons. The experimental results are interpreted through an original phenomenological approach, which leads to a coherent picture of quarkonium production cross sections and polarizations within a simple model, dominated by one single color-octet production mechanism. These findings provide new insights into the dynamics of heavy quarkonium production at the LHC, an important step towards a satisfactory understanding of hadron formation within the standard model of particle physics.
In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.
The problem of irreversibility is ubiquitous in physics and chemistry. The present book attempts to present a unified theoretical and conceptual framework for the description of various irreversible phenomena in quantum mechanics. In a sense, this book supplements conventional textbooks on quantum mechanics by including the theory of irreversibilities. However, the content and style of this book are more appropriate for a monograph than a textbook. We have tried to arrange the material so that, as far as possible, the reader need not continually refer elsewhere. The references to the literature make no pretense of completeness. The book is by no means a survey of present theoretical work. We have tried to highlight the basic principles and their results, while the attention has been mainly paid to the problems in which the author himself has been involved. The book as a whole is designed for the reader with knowledge of theoretical physics (especially quantum mechanics) at university level. This book is based on the courses of lectures given at the Chemistry Department of Tel-Aviv University.
This monograph is accessible to anyone with an undergraduate background in quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and some solid state physics. It describes in detail the properties of particles and fields in quasi-two-dimensional systems used to approximate realistic quantum heterostructures. Here the authors treat wires, i.e. they assume an infinite hardwall potential for the system. They discuss bound states, the properties of transmission and reflection, conductance, etc. It is shown that the simple models developed in this book in detail are capable of understanding even complex physical phenomena. The methods are applied to optical states in photonic crystals, and similarities and differences between those and electronic states in quantum heterostructures and electromagnetic fields in waveguides are discussed.
In this thesis the author discusses the phenomenology of supersymmetric models by means of experimental data set analysis of the electric dipole moment. There is an evaluation of the elementary processes contributing to the electric dipole moments within R-parity-violating supersymmetry, which call for higher-order perturbative computations. A new method based on linear programming is developed and for
the first time the non-trivial parameter space of R-parity
violation respecting the constraints from existing experimental
data of the electric dipole moment is revealed. As well, the
impressive efficiency of the new method in scanning the parameter
space of the R-parity-violating sector is effectively demonstrated.
This new method makes it possible to extract from the experimental
data a more reliable constraint on the R-parity violation.
In this fascinating and accessible book, physicist Victor J. Stenger guides the lay reader through the key developments of quantum mechanics and the debate over its apparent paradoxes. In the process, he critically appraises recent metaphysical fads popularized by such authors as Deepak Chopra and Fritjof Capra. Dr. Stenger's knack for elucidating scientific ideas and controversies in language that the nonspecialist can comprehend opens up to the widest possible audience a wealth of information on the most important findings of contemporary physics. Stenger makes it clear that current scientific hypotheses about the material nature of reality are all we need to explain the available evidence and that mystical notions say more about the human need to believe than about the fundamental makeup of the universe.
The articles in this book have been selected from the lectures of a NATO Advanced Study Institute held at Bad Lauterberg (Germany) in August 1995. Internationally well-known researchers in the field of mesoscopic quantum physics provide insight into the fundamental physics underlying the mesoscopic transport phenomena in structured semiconductor inversion layers. In addition, some of the most recent achievements are reported in contributed papers. The aim of the volume is not to give an overview over the field. Instead, emphasis is on interaction and correlation phenomena that turn out to be of increasing importance for the understanding of the phenomena in the quantum Hall regime, and in the transport through quantum dots. The present status of the quantum Hall experiments and theory is reviewed. As a "key example" for non-Fermi liquid behavior the Luttinger liquid is introduced, including some of the most recent developments. It is not only of importance for the fractional quantum Hall effect, but also for the understanding of transport in quantum wires. Furthermore, the chaotic and the correlation aspects of the transport in quantum dot systems are described. The status of the experimental work in the area of persistent currents in semiconductor systems is outlined. The construction of one of the first single-electron transistors is reported. The theoretical approach to mesoscopic transport, presently a most active area, is treated, and some aspects of time-dependent transport phenomena are also discussed.
The present book takes the discovery that quantum-like behaviour is not solely reserved to atomic particles one step further. If electrons are modelled as vibrating droplets instead of the usually assumed point objects, and if the classical laws of nature are applied, then exactly the same behaviour as in quantum theory is found, quantitatively correct! The world of atoms is strange and quantum mechanics, the theory of this world, is almost magic. Or is it? Tiny droplets of oil bouncing round on a fluid surface can also mimic the world of quantum mechanics. For the layman - for whom the main part of this book is written - this is good news. If the everyday laws of nature can conspire to show up quantum-like phenomena, there is hope to form mental pictures how the atomic world works. The book is almost formula-free, and explains everything by using many sketches and diagrams. The mathematical derivations underlying the main text are kept separate in a -peer reviewed - appendix. The author, a retired professor of Flight Mechanics and Propulsion at the Delft University of Technology, chose to publish his findings in this mixed popular and scientific form, because he found that interested laymen more often than professional physicists feel the need to form visualisations of quantum phenomena.
This volume contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Quantum Chaos -- Theory and Experiment', held at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, from 28 May to 1 June 1991. The work brings together leading quantum chaos theorists and experimentalists and greatly improves our understanding of the physics of quantum systems whose classical limit is chaotic. Quantum chaos is a subject of considerable current interest in a variety of fields, in particular nuclear physics, chemistry, statistical mechanics, atomic physics, condensed matter physics and nonlinear dynamics. The volume contains lectures about the currently most active fronts of quantum chaos, such as scars, semiclassical methods, quantum diffusion, random matrix spectra, quantum chaos in atomic and nuclear physics, and possible implications of quantum chaos for the problem of quantum measurement. Part of the book -- The Physics of Quantum Measurements -- is dedicated to the memory of John Bell.
The nonlocality phenomena exhibited by entangled quantum systems are certainly one of the most extraordinary aspects of quantum theory. This book discusses this phe nomenon according to several points of view, i.e., according to different interpretations of the mathematics of the quantum formalism. The several interpretations of the Copenhagen interpretation, the many worlds, the de Broglie-Bohm, quantum logics, the decohering by the environment approach and the histories approach interpretations are scrutinized and criticized in detail. Recent results on cryptography, quantum bit commitment, quantum erasers and teleportation are also presented and discussed. In preparing the book we benefited from discussions with many people, but we would like, in particular, to express our gratitude to Professor B. d'Espagnat for his useful comments and suggestions. We are grateful also to Ms. L. Gentry EI-Dash for the English revision, to Dr. 1. E. Maiorino for the production of the figures and a careful reading of the manuscript, and for the statI of Plenum for advice and for having produced a nice book. Finally, the authors thank FAPESP (contract no. I 99612657-0) for a grant making this book possible. A. A. ORIB AND W. A. RODRIGUES, JR."
In this thesis the author contributes to the analysis of neutrino beam data collected between 2010 and 2013 to identify e events at the Super-Kamiokande detector. In particular, the author improves the pion-nucleus interaction uncertainty, which is one of the dominant systematic error sources in T2K neutrino oscillation measurement. In the thesis, the measurement of e oscillation in the T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) experiment is presented and a new constraint on CP is obtained. This measurement and the analysis establish, at greater than 5 significance, the observation of e oscillation for the first time in the world. Combining the T2K e oscillation measurement with the latest findings on oscillation parameters including the world average value of 13 from reactor experiments, the constraint on the value of CP at the 90% confidence level is obtained. This constraint on CP is an important step towards the discovery of CP violation in the lepton sector.
Quantum mechanics provides the fundamental theoretical apparatus for describing the structure and properties of atoms and molecules in terms of the behaviour of their fundamental components, electrons and nudeL For heavy atoms and molecules containing them, the electrons can move at speeds which represent a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and thus relativity must be taken into account. Relativistic quantum mechanics therefore provides the basic formalism for calculating the properties of heavy-atom systems. The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed description of the application of relativistic quantum mechanics to the many-body prob lem in the theoretical chemistry and physics of heavy and superheavy elements. Recent years have witnessed a continued and growing interest in relativistic quantum chemical methods and the associated computa tional algorithms which facilitate their application. This interest is fu elled by the need to develop robust, yet efficient theoretical approaches, together with efficient algorithms, which can be applied to atoms in the lower part of the Periodic Table and, more particularly, molecules and molecular entities containing such atoms. Such relativistic theories and computational algorithms are an essential ingredient for the description of heavy element chemistry, becoming even more important in the case of superheavy elements. They are destined to become an indispensable tool in the quantum chemist's armoury. Indeed, since relativity influences the structure of every atom in the Periodic Table, relativistic molecular structure methods may replace in many applications the non-relativistic techniques widely used in contemporary research."
In this book the author extends the concepts previously introduced in his "Quantum Field Theory in Condensed Matter Physics" to situations in which the strong electronic correlations are crucial for the understanding of the observed phenomena. Starting from a model field theory to illustrate the basic ideas, more complex systems are analysed in turn. A special chapter is devoted to the description of antiferromagnets, doped Mott insulators and quantum Hall liquids from the point of view of gauge theory. This advanced text is written for graduate students and researchers working in related areas of physics.
This thesis presents two production cross-section measurements of pairs of massive bosons using final states with leptons, made with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The first measurement, performed using data collected in 2012 at center-of-mass energy s = 8 TeV, is the first fiducial and differential cross-section measurement of the production of the Higgs Boson when it decays to four charged leptons (electrons or muons). The second measurement is the first fiducial and inclusive production cross-section measurement of WZ pairs at center-of-mass energy s = 13 TeV using final states with three charged leptons. A significant portion of the thesis focuses on the methods used to identify electrons from massive boson decay-important for many flagship measurements-and on assessing the efficiency of these particle identification techniques. The chapter discussing the WZ pair cross-section measurement provides a detailed example of an estimate of lepton background in the context of an analysis with three leptons in the final state. |
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