16669427
Lens optics as an optical computer for group contractions.
It is shown that the one-lens system in para-axial optics can serve as an optical computer for contraction of Wigner's little groups and an analog computer that transforms analytically computations on a spherical surface to those on a hyperbolic surface. It is shown possible to construct a set of Lorentz transformations which leads to a 2x2 matrix whose expression is the same as those in the para-axial lens optics. It is shown that the lens focal condition corresponds to the contraction of the O(3)-like little group for a massive particle to the E(2)-like little group for a massless particle, and also to the contraction of the O(2,1)-like little group for a spacelike particle to the same E(2)-like little group. The lens-focusing transformations presented in this paper allow us to continue analytically the spherical O(3) world to the hyperbolic O(2,1) world, and vice versa. Since the traditional role of Wigner's little groups has been to dictate the internal space-time symmetries of massive, massless, and imaginary-mass particles, the one-lens system provides a unification of those symmetries.
14939249
Coupled Harmonic Oscillators and Feynman's Rest of the Universe
According to Feynman, the universe consists of two parts - the system in which we are interested and the rest of the universe which our measurement process does not reach. Feynman then formulates the density matrix in terms of the observable world and the rest of the universe. It is shown that coupled harmonic oscillators can serve as an illustrative example for Feynman's ``rest of the universe.'' It is pointed out that this simple example has far-reaching consequences in many branches of physics, including statistical mechanics, measurement theory, information theory, thermo-field dynamics, quantum optics, and relativistic quantum mechanics. It is shown that our ignorance of the rest of the universe increases the uncertainty and entropy in the system in which we are interested.
8670554
Eugene Wigner and Translational Symmetries
As Einstein's $E = mc^{2}$ unifies the energy-momentum relation for massive and massless particles, Wigner's little group unifies their internal space-time symmetries. It is pointed out that translational symmetries play essential roles both in formulating the problem, and in deriving the conclusions. The input translational symmetry is the space-time translation, and the output translational symmetry is built in the E(2)-like little group for massless particles. The translational degrees of freedom in this little group are gauge degrees of freedom. It should be noted that a number of condensed matter physicists played important supporting and supplementary roles in Wigner's unification of internal space-time symmetries of massive and massless particles.
40702960
Covariant phase-space representation and overlapping distribution functions.
The Lorentz deformation property of the phase-space distribution function is studied for harmonic oscillators. The overlap effect of two distribution functions is discussed in detail. It is shown that the Lorentz deformation of the phase-space distribution is responsible for the polynomial cutoff behavior of the proton form factor in the harmonic-oscillator quark model.
1320799
Wigner rotations and Iwasawa decompositions in polarization optics.
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 transformations corresponding to Wigner rotations and Iwasawa decompositions. This is possible because the combined effects of rotation, phase-shift, and attenuation filters lead to transformation matrices of the six-parameter Lorentz group applicable to Jones vectors and Stokes parameters for polarized light waves. The symmetry transformations in special relativity lead to a set of experiments which can be performed in optics laboratories.
668406
Quantization of electromagnetic fields in a circular cylindrical cavity
We present a quantization procedure for the electromagnetic field in a circular cylindrical cavity with perfectly conducting walls, which is based on the decomposition of the field. A new decomposition procedure is proposed; all vector mode functions satisfying the boundary conditions are obtained with the help of this decomposition. After expanding the quantized field in terms of the vector mode functions, it is possible to derive the Hamiltonian for this quantized system.
121398906
Generalized Fermi-Segrè formula
17884247
Performance of the LHCb RICH detector at the LHC
The LHCb experiment has been taking data at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN since the end of 2009. One of its key detector components is the Ring-Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) system. This provides charged particle identification over a wide momentum range, from 2–100 GeV/c. The operation and control, software, and online monitoring of the RICH system are described. The particle identification performance is presented, as measured using data from the LHC. Excellent separation of hadronic particle types (π, K, p) is achieved.
13722156
Enhancement of the ATLAS trigger system with a hardware tracker finder FTK
The existing three-level ATLAS trigger system is deployed to reduce the event rate from the bunch crossing rate of 40 MHz to ~ 200 Hz for permanent storage at the LHC design luminosity of 1034 cm−2 s−1. When the LHC exceeds the design luminosity, the load on the Level-2 trigger system will significantly increase due both to the need for more sophisticated algorithms to suppress background and the larger event sizes. The Fast Tracker is a proposed upgrade to the current ATLAS trigger system that will operate at the full Level-1 accepted rate of 100 kHz and provide high quality tracks at the beginning of processing in the Level-2 trigger, by performing track reconstruction in hardware with massive parallelism of associative memories. The concept design is being advanced and justified with the performance in important physics areas, b-tagging, τ-tagging and lepton isolation. The prototyping with current technology is underway and R&D with new technologies has been started.
119289779
M(T2)-assisted on-shell reconstruction of missing momenta and its application to spin measurement at the LHC
We propose a scheme to assign a 4-momentum to each WIMP in new physics event producing a pair of mother particles each of which decays to an invisible weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) plus some visible particle(s). The transverse components are given by the value that determines the event variable M{sub T2}, while the longitudinal component is determined by the on-shell condition on the mother particle. Although it does not give the true WIMP momentum in general, this M{sub T2}-assisted on-shell reconstruction of missing momenta provides kinematic variables well correlated to the true WIMP momentum and thus can be useful for an experimental determination of new particle properties. We apply this scheme to some processes to measure the mother particle spin and find that spin determination is possible even without good knowledge of the new particle masses.
120238308
Subshell branching ratios of partial photoionization cross sections