The Physics Of Time Reversal

Download or read book The Physics of Time Reversal written by Robert G. Sachs and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion that fundamental equations governing the motions of physical systems are invariant under the time reversal transformation (T) has been an important, but often subliminal, element in the development of theoretical physics. It serves as a powerful and useful tool in analyzing the structure of matter at all scales, from gases and condensed matter to subnuclear physics and the quantum theory of fields. The assumption of invariance under T was called into question, however, by the 1964 discovery that a closely related assumption, that of CP invariance (where C is charge conjugation and P is space inversion), is violated in the decay of neutral K mesons. In The Physics of Time Reversal, Robert G. Sachs comprehensively treats the role of the transformation T, both as a tool for analyzing the structure of matter and as a field of fundamental research relating to CP violation. For this purpose he reformulates the definitions of T, P, and C so as to avoid subliminal assumptions of invariance. He summarizes the standard phenomenology of CP violation in the K-meson system and addresses the question of the mysterious origin of CP violation. Using simple examples based on the standard quark model, Sachs summarizes and illustrates how these phenomenological methods can be extended to analysis of future experiments on heavy mesons. He notes that his reformulated approach to conventional quantum field theory leads to new questions about the meaning of the transformations in the context of recent theoretical developments such as non-Abelian gauge theories, and he suggests ways in which these questions may lead to new directions of research.

Download or read book The Physical Basis of The Direction of Time written by H. Dieter Zeh and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The asymmetry of natural phenomena under time reversal is striking. Here Zehinvestigates the most important classes of physical phenomena that characterize the arrow of time, discussing their interrelations as well as striving to uncover a cosmological common root of the phenomena, such as the time-independent wave function of the universe. The description of irreversible phenomena is shown to be fundamentally "observer-related". Both physicists and philosophers of science who reviewed the first edition considered this book a magnificent survey, a concise, technically sophisticated, up-to-date discussion of the subject, showing fine sensivity to some of the crucial philosophicalsubtleties. This new and expanded edition will be welcomed by both students and specialists.

Download or read book Time and Chance written by David Z Albert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

Download or read book Time in Physics written by Renato Renner and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important questions concerning the foundations of physics, especially since the discovery of relativity and quantum theory, is the nature and role of time. In this book we bring together researchers from different areas of physics, mathematics, computer science and philosophy to discuss the role time plays in physics. There have been few books on this topic to date, and two of the key aims of the workshop and this book are to encourage more researchers to explore this area, and to pique students’ interest in the different roles time plays in physics.

Download or read book Reciprocity, Spatial Mapping and Time Reversal in Electromagnetics written by C. Altman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The choice of topics in this book may seem somewhat arbitrary, even though we have attempted to organize them in a logical structure. The contents reflect the path of 'search and discovery' followed by us, on and off, for the in fact last twenty years. In the winter of 1970-71 one of the authors (C. A. ), on sah baticalleave with L. R. O. Storey's research team at the Groupe de Recherches Ionospheriques at Saint-Maur in France, had been finding almost exact symme tries in the computed reflection and transmission matrices for plane-stratified magnetoplasmas when symmetrically related directions of incidence were com pared. At the suggestion of the other author (K. S. , also on leave at the same institute), the complex conjugate wave fields, used to construct the eigenmode amplitudes via the mean Poynting flux densities, were replaced by the adjoint wave fields that would propagate in a medium with transposed constitutve tensors, et voila, a scattering theorem-'reciprocity in k-space'-was found in the computer output. To prove the result analytically one had to investigate the properties of the adjoint Maxwell system, and the two independent proofs that followed, in 1975 and 1979, proceeded respectively via the matrizant method and the thin-layer scattering-matrix method for solving the scattering problem, according to the personal preferences of each of the authors. The proof given in Chap. 2 of this book, based on the hindsight provided by our later results, is simpler and much more concise.

Download or read book Wave Propagation and Time Reversal in Randomly Layered Media written by Jean-Pierre Fouque and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-06-30 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The content of this book is multidisciplinary by nature. It uses mathematical tools from the theories of probability and stochastic processes, partial differential equations, and asymptotic analysis, combined with the physics of wave propagation and modeling of time reversal experiments. It is addressed to a wide audience of graduate students and researchers interested in the intriguing phenomena related to waves propagating in random media. At the end of each chapter there is a section of notes where the authors give references and additional comments on the various results presented in the chapter.

Download or read book Time-Reversal Symmetry written by Ion I. Geru and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces new developments in the field of Time-Reversal Symmetry presenting, for the first time, the Wigner time-reversal operator in the form of a product of two- or three time-reversal operators of lower symmetry. The action of these operators leads to the sign change of only one or two angular momentum components, not of all of them. It demonstrates that there are six modes of time-reversal symmetry breaking that do not lead to the complete disappearance of the symmetry but to its lowering. The full restoration of the time-reversal symmetry in the six cases mentioned is possible by introducing six types of metaparticles. The book also confirms the presence of six additional time-reversal operators using a group-theoretical method. The problem is only where to seek these metaparticles. The book discusses time-reversal symmetry in classical mechanics, classical and relativistic electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and theory of quantized fields, including dynamical reversibility and statistical irreversibility of the time, Wigner’s and Herring’s criteria, Kramers theorem, selection rules due to time-reversal symmetry, Onsager’s relations, Poincaré recurrence theorem, and CPT theorem. It particularly focuses attention on time-reversal symmetry violation. It is proposed a new method of testing the time-reversal symmetry, which is confirmed experimentally by EPR spectroscopy data. It shows that the traditional black-white point groups of magnetic symmetry are not applicable to magnetic systems with Kramers degeneration of energy levels and that magnetic groups of four-color symmetry are adequate for them. Further, it addresses the predicted structural distortions in Kramers three-homonuclear magnetic clusters due to time-reversal symmetry that have been identified experimentally. Lastly, it proposes a method of synthesis of two-nuclear coordination compounds with predictable magnetic properties, based on the application of the time-reversal transformation that was confirmed experimentally.