Conceptual Problems in Quantum Electrodynamics: a Contemporary Historical-Philosophical Approach
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Quantum Optics: an Introduction
The Himalayan Physics, Vol.1, No.1, May 2010 Quantum Optics: An Introduction Min Raj Lamsal Prithwi Narayan Campus, Pokhara Email: [email protected] Optics is the physics, which deals with the study of in electrodynamics gave beautiful and satisfactory nature of light, its propagation in different media description of the electromagnetic phenomena. At (including vacuum) & its interaction with different the same time, the kinetic theory of gases provided materials. Quantum is a packet of energy absorbed or a microscopic basis for the thermo dynamical emitted in the form of tiny packets called quanta. It properties of matter. Up to the end of the nineteenth means the amount of energy released or absorbed in century, the classical physics was so successful a physical process is always an integral multiple of and impressive in explaining physical phenomena a discrete unit of energy known as quantum which is that the scientists of that time absolutely believed also known as photon. Quantum Optics is a fi eld of that they were potentially capable of explaining all research in physics, dealing with the application of physical phenomena. quantum mechanics to phenomena involving light and its interactions with matter. However, the fi rst indication of inadequacy of the Physics in which majority of physical phenomena classical physics was seen in the beginning of the can be successfully described by using Newton’s twentieth century where it could not explain the laws of motion is called classical physics. In fact, the experimentally observed spectra of a blackbody classical physics includes the classical mechanics and radiation. In addition, the laws in classical physics the electromagnetic theory. -
Quantum Field Theory*
Quantum Field Theory y Frank Wilczek Institute for Advanced Study, School of Natural Science, Olden Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540 I discuss the general principles underlying quantum eld theory, and attempt to identify its most profound consequences. The deep est of these consequences result from the in nite number of degrees of freedom invoked to implement lo cality.Imention a few of its most striking successes, b oth achieved and prosp ective. Possible limitation s of quantum eld theory are viewed in the light of its history. I. SURVEY Quantum eld theory is the framework in which the regnant theories of the electroweak and strong interactions, which together form the Standard Mo del, are formulated. Quantum electro dynamics (QED), b esides providing a com- plete foundation for atomic physics and chemistry, has supp orted calculations of physical quantities with unparalleled precision. The exp erimentally measured value of the magnetic dip ole moment of the muon, 11 (g 2) = 233 184 600 (1680) 10 ; (1) exp: for example, should b e compared with the theoretical prediction 11 (g 2) = 233 183 478 (308) 10 : (2) theor: In quantum chromo dynamics (QCD) we cannot, for the forseeable future, aspire to to comparable accuracy.Yet QCD provides di erent, and at least equally impressive, evidence for the validity of the basic principles of quantum eld theory. Indeed, b ecause in QCD the interactions are stronger, QCD manifests a wider variety of phenomena characteristic of quantum eld theory. These include esp ecially running of the e ective coupling with distance or energy scale and the phenomenon of con nement. -
The Concept of Quantum State : New Views on Old Phenomena Michel Paty
The concept of quantum state : new views on old phenomena Michel Paty To cite this version: Michel Paty. The concept of quantum state : new views on old phenomena. Ashtekar, Abhay, Cohen, Robert S., Howard, Don, Renn, Jürgen, Sarkar, Sahotra & Shimony, Abner. Revisiting the Founda- tions of Relativistic Physics : Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 451-478, 2003. halshs-00189410 HAL Id: halshs-00189410 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00189410 Submitted on 20 Nov 2007 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. « The concept of quantum state: new views on old phenomena », in Ashtekar, Abhay, Cohen, Robert S., Howard, Don, Renn, Jürgen, Sarkar, Sahotra & Shimony, Abner (eds.), Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics : Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 451-478. , 2003 The concept of quantum state : new views on old phenomena par Michel PATY* ABSTRACT. Recent developments in the area of the knowledge of quantum systems have led to consider as physical facts statements that appeared formerly to be more related to interpretation, with free options. -
On the Definition of the Renormalization Constants in Quantum Electrodynamics
On the Definition of the Renormalization Constants in Quantum Electrodynamics Autor(en): Källén, Gunnar Objekttyp: Article Zeitschrift: Helvetica Physica Acta Band(Jahr): 25(1952) Heft IV Erstellt am: Mar 18, 2014 Persistenter Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.5169/seals-112316 Nutzungsbedingungen Mit dem Zugriff auf den vorliegenden Inhalt gelten die Nutzungsbedingungen als akzeptiert. Die angebotenen Dokumente stehen für nicht-kommerzielle Zwecke in Lehre, Forschung und für die private Nutzung frei zur Verfügung. Einzelne Dateien oder Ausdrucke aus diesem Angebot können zusammen mit diesen Nutzungsbedingungen und unter deren Einhaltung weitergegeben werden. Die Speicherung von Teilen des elektronischen Angebots auf anderen Servern ist nur mit vorheriger schriftlicher Genehmigung möglich. Die Rechte für diese und andere Nutzungsarten der Inhalte liegen beim Herausgeber bzw. beim Verlag. Ein Dienst der ETH-Bibliothek Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich, Schweiz [email protected] http://retro.seals.ch On the Definition of the Renormalization Constants in Quantum Electrodynamics by Gunnar Källen.*) Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich. (14.11.1952.) Summary. A formulation of quantum electrodynamics in terms of the renor- malized Heisenberg operators and the experimental mass and charge of the electron is given. The renormalization constants are implicitly defined and ex¬ pressed as integrals over finite functions in momentum space. No discussion of the convergence of these integrals or of the existence of rigorous solutions is given. Introduction. The renormalization method in quantum electrodynamics has been investigated by many authors, and it has been proved by Dyson1) that every term in a formal expansion in powers of the coupling constant of various expressions is a finite quantity. -
THE DEVELOPMENT of the SPACE-TIME VIEW of QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS∗ by Richard P
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPACE-TIME VIEW OF QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS∗ by Richard P. Feynman California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965. We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize. I realize that a truly scientific paper would be of greater value, but such a paper I could publish in regular journals. So, I shall use this Nobel Lecture as an opportunity to do something of less value, but which I cannot do elsewhere. -
Richard P. Feynman Author
Title: The Making of a Genius: Richard P. Feynman Author: Christian Forstner Ernst-Haeckel-Haus Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Berggasse 7 D-07743 Jena Germany Fax: +49 3641 949 502 Email: [email protected] Abstract: In 1965 the Nobel Foundation honored Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics and the consequences for the physics of elementary particles. In contrast to both of his colleagues only Richard Feynman appeared as a genius before the public. In his autobiographies he managed to connect his behavior, which contradicted several social and scientific norms, with the American myth of the “practical man”. This connection led to the image of a common American with extraordinary scientific abilities and contributed extensively to enhance the image of Feynman as genius in the public opinion. Is this image resulting from Feynman’s autobiographies in accordance with historical facts? This question is the starting point for a deeper historical analysis that tries to put Feynman and his actions back into historical context. The image of a “genius” appears then as a construct resulting from the public reception of brilliant scientific research. Introduction Richard Feynman is “half genius and half buffoon”, his colleague Freeman Dyson wrote in a letter to his parents in 1947 shortly after having met Feynman for the first time.1 It was precisely this combination of outstanding scientist of great talent and seeming clown that was conducive to allowing Feynman to appear as a genius amongst the American public. Between Feynman’s image as a genius, which was created significantly through the representation of Feynman in his autobiographical writings, and the historical perspective on his earlier career as a young aspiring physicist, a discrepancy exists that has not been observed in prior biographical literature. -
Feynman Quantization
3 FEYNMAN QUANTIZATION An introduction to path-integral techniques Introduction. By Richard Feynman (–), who—after a distinguished undergraduate career at MIT—had come in as a graduate student to Princeton, was deeply involved in a collaborative effort with John Wheeler (his thesis advisor) to shake the foundations of field theory. Though motivated by problems fundamental to quantum field theory, as it was then conceived, their work was entirely classical,1 and it advanced ideas so radicalas to resist all then-existing quantization techniques:2 new insight into the quantization process itself appeared to be called for. So it was that (at a beer party) Feynman asked Herbert Jehle (formerly a student of Schr¨odinger in Berlin, now a visitor at Princeton) whether he had ever encountered a quantum mechanical application of the “Principle of Least Action.” Jehle directed Feynman’s attention to an obscure paper by P. A. M. Dirac3 and to a brief passage in §32 of Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics 1 John Archibald Wheeler & Richard Phillips Feynman, “Interaction with the absorber as the mechanism of radiation,” Reviews of Modern Physics 17, 157 (1945); “Classical electrodynamics in terms of direct interparticle action,” Reviews of Modern Physics 21, 425 (1949). Those were (respectively) Part III and Part II of a projected series of papers, the other parts of which were never published. 2 See page 128 in J. Gleick, Genius: The Life & Science of Richard Feynman () for a popular account of the historical circumstances. 3 “The Lagrangian in quantum mechanics,” Physicalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion 3, 64 (1933). The paper is reprinted in J. -
High-Energy Physics from 1945 to 1952/ 53
CHS-17 March 1985 STUDIES IN CERN HISTORY High-energy physics from 1945 to 1952/ 53 Ulrike Mersits GENEVA 1985 The Study of CERN History is a project financed by Institutions in several CERN Member Countries. This report presents preliminary findings, and is intended for incorporation into a more comprehensive study of CERN's history. It is distributed primarily to historians and scientists to provoke discussion, and no part of it should be cited or reproduced without written permission from the Team Leader. Comments are welcome and should be sent to: Study Team for CERN History c/oCERN CH-1211 GENEVE23 Switzerland © Copyright Study Team for CERN History, Geneva 1985 CERN-Service d'information scientifique - 300- mars 1985 HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS from 1945 to 1952/53 I. The scientific situation in 'elementary particle physics' around 1945/46 I.1. Cosmic-ray physics I.2 Nuclear physics II. Institutional changes in nuclear physics due to the war III. The post-war accelerator programmes III.1. The principle of phase stability III.2. The United States III.3. Great Britain - the leading country in Europe III.4. Continental western Europe III.5. AG focusing - another step into higher energy regions IV. Experimental particle physics: developments from 1946 to 1953 IV.1. The leptonic nature of the mesotron and the detection of the pi meson (1946/47) IV.2. The artificial production of charged and uncharged pi-mesons (1948/49) IV.3. The complexity of the mass spectrum (1947-1953) IV.3.1.The V-particles IV.3.2.The heavy mesons IV.3.3.The Bagneres-de-Bigorre Conference (1953) V. -
Symmetry Breaking and Exceptional Points in Cavity QED 13 September 2018
Physicists revealed spontaneous T- symmetry breaking and exceptional points in cavity QED 13 September 2018 between the collective motion of the atoms and the cavity mode," said Yu-Kun Lu, who is an undergraduate at Peking University. "For small coupling strength, the system undergoes harmonic oscillation, which is invariant under time-reversal operation. When the coupling strength reaches a threshold, the system becomes unstable against the pair-production (annihilation) process, and the excitation number of the cavity mode and the atoms will increase (decrease) with time, thus leading to the spontaneous T-symmetry breaking." The critical point between the T-symmetric and T-symmetry broken phase is proved to be an EP. Schematic illustration of the system and the mechanism of T-symmetry breaking. Credit: ©Science China Press Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is a physics phenomenon in which a symmetric system produces symmetry-violating states. Recently, extensive study shows that the parity-time symmetry breaking in open systems leads to exceptional points, promising for novel applications leasers and sensing. In this work, the researchers theoretically demonstrated spontaneous time-reversal symmetry (T-symmetry) breaking in a cavity quantum electrodynamics system. The system is composed of an ensemble of 2-level atoms inside a cavity. The atoms are kept near their highest excited states and act like an oscillator with a negative mass. The researchers utilize the dipole Demonstration of T-symmetry breaking in the eigenmode dynamics. Credit: ©Science China Press interaction between the atoms and the cavity mode to induce the T-symmetry breaking and to obtain exceptional points (EPs). "To demonstrate the existence of EP, we showed "The dipole interaction provides a linear coupling the dependence of the eigenfrequencies as well as 1 / 2 the eigenmode on the cavity-atom detuning, and we found they coalesce at the critical point, and thus proved it to be an EP," said Pai Peng, a former undergraduate in Prof. -
Structure of Vacuum in Chiral Supersymmetric Quantum Electrodynamics A
Structure of vacuum in chiral supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics A. V. Smilga Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow (Submitted 21 January 1986) Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 91, 14-24 (July 1986) An effective Hamiltonian is found for supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics defined in a finite volume. When the right and left fields appear in the theory nonsymmetrically (but so that anomalies cancel out), this Hamiltonian turns out to be nontrivial and describes the motion of a particle in the "ionic crystal" consisting of magnetic charges of different sign with an additional scalar potential of the form U = K '/2, where aiK = z..Despite the nontrivial form of the effective Hamiltonian, supersymmetry remains unbroken. 1. INTRODUCTION analysis of nonchiral theories. We shall investigate the sim- One of the most acute problems in theoretical elemen- plest example of chiral supersymmetric QCD. Unfortunate- tary-particle physics is the question of supersymmetry ly, our original hopes have not been justified, and supersym- breaking, which is generally believed to occur in nature in metry remains unbroken in this theory. The effective one form or another at high enough energies. The most at- Hamiltonian has, however, turned out to be highly nontri- tractive mechanism of supersymmetry breaking is spontane- vial and does not reduce to free motion, as was the case for ous breaking by dynamic effects, not manifest at the "tree" nonchiral theories. The methods developed below can be level. A well-known example of this type of breaking occurs used in the analysis of more complicated chiral theories, in- in the Witten quantum mechanics with superpotential of the cluding those in which supersymmetry is definitely broken. -
Julian Schwinger (1918-1994)
Julian Schwinger (1918-1994) K. A. Milton Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019 June 15, 2006 Julian Schwinger’s influence on Twentieth Century science is profound and pervasive. Of course, he is most famous for his renormalization theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Feynman and Sin-itiro Tomonaga. But although this triumph was undoubt- edly his most heroic accomplishment, his legacy lives on chiefly through sub- tle and elegant work in classical electrodynamics, quantum variational princi- ples, proper-time methods, quantum anomalies, dynamical mass generation, partial symmetry, and more. Starting as just a boy, he rapidly became the pre-eminent nuclear physicist in the late 1930s, led the theoretical develop- ment of radar technology at MIT during World War II, and then, soon after the war, conquered quantum electrodynamics, and became the leading quan- tum field theorist for two decades, before taking a more iconoclastic route during his last quarter century. Given his commanding stature in theoretical physics for decades it may seem puzzling why he is relatively unknown now to the educated public, even to many younger physicists, while Feynman is a cult figure with his photograph needing no more introduction than Einstein’s. This relative ob- scurity is even more remarkable, in view of the enormous number of eminent physicists, as well as other leaders in science and industry, who received their Ph.D.’s under Schwinger’s direction, while Feynman had but few. In part, the answer lies in Schwinger’s retiring nature and reserved demeanor. -
Something Is Rotten in the State of QED
February 2020 Something is rotten in the state of QED Oliver Consa Independent Researcher, Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected] Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is considered the most accurate theory in the his- tory of science. However, this precision is based on a single experimental value: the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron (g-factor). An examination of QED history reveals that this value was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps, manipula- tions and tricks. These traps included the fraud of Kroll & Karplus, who acknowledged that they lied in their presentation of the most relevant calculation in QED history. As we will demonstrate in this paper, the Kroll & Karplus scandal was not a unique event. Instead, the scandal represented the fraudulent manner in which physics has been conducted from the creation of QED through today. 1 Introduction truth the hypotheses of the former members of the Manhat- tan Project were rewarded with positions of responsibility in After the end of World War II, American physicists organized research centers, while those who criticized their work were a series of three transcendent conferences for the separated and ostracized. The devil’s seed had been planted development of modern physics: Shelter Island (1947), in the scientific community, and its inevitable consequences Pocono (1948) and Oldstone (1949). These conferences were would soon grow and flourish. intended to be a continuation of the mythical Solvay confer- ences. But, after World War II, the world had changed. 2 Shelter Island (1947) The launch of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and 2.1 The problem of infinities Nagasaki (1945), followed by the immediate surrender of Japan, made the Manhattan Project scientists true war heroes.