Vacuum Quantum Effects in Strong Fields PDF Download

Author: Andrej A. Grib
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Quantum field theory
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Author: Luciano Boi
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402475
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A vacuum, classically understood, contains nothing. The quantum vacuum, on the other hand, is a seething cauldron of nothingness: particle pairs going in and out of existence continuously and rapidly while exerting influence over an enormous range of scales. Acclaimed mathematical physicist and natural philosopher Luciano Boi expounds the quantum vacuum, exploring the meaning of nothingness and its relationship with physical reality. Boi first provides a deep analysis of the interaction between geometry and physics at the quantum level. He next describes the relationship between the microscopic and macroscopic structures of the world. In so doing, Boi sheds light on the very nature of the universe, stressing in an original and profound way the relationship between quantum geometry and the internal symmetries underlying the behavior of matter and the interactions of forces. Beyond the physics and mathematics of the quantum vacuum, Boi offers a profoundly philosophical interpretation of the concept. Plato and Aristotle did not believe a vacuum was possible. How could nothing be something, they asked? Boi traces the evolution of the quantum vacuum from an abstract concept in ancient Greece to its fundamental role in quantum field theory and string theory in modern times. The quantum vacuum is a complex entity, one essential to understanding some of the most intriguing issues in twentieth-century physics, including cosmic singularity, dark matter and energy, and the existence of the Higgs boson particle. Boi explains with simple clarity the relevant theories and fundamental concepts of the quantum vacuum. Theoretical, mathematical, and particle physicists, as well as researchers and students of the history and philosophy of physics, will find The Quantum Vacuum to be a stimulating and engaging primer on the topic.

Author: Greiner W. Hold
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489921397
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 896

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The NATO Advanced Study Institute on Quantum Electrodynamics of Strong Fields was held at Lahnstein on the Rhine from 15-26 June, 1981. The school was devoted to the advances, theoretical and exper imental, in the physics of strong fields made during the past decade. The topic of the first week was almost exclusively quantum electrodynamics, with discussions of symmetry breaking in the ground state, of the physics of heavy ion collisions and of precision tests of perturbative quantum electrodynamics. This was followed in the second week by the presentation of a broad range of other areas where strong fields occur, reaching from nuclear physics over quantum chromodynamics to gravitation theory and astrophysics. We were fortunate to be able to call on a body of lecturers who not only have made considerable personal contributions to these advances but who are also noted for their lecturing skills. Their dedication for their subject was readily transmitted to the stu dents resulting in a very successful school. This enthusiasm is also reflected in their contributions to these Proceedings which, as I believe, will in time become a standard source of reference for future work on the physics of strong fields and will help to spread the benefits of the school to a larger audience than those who were able to attend. I regret that the Soviet colleagues Ya. B. Zeldovich and V. S. Popov were unable to participate.

Author: Walter Greiner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364282272X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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The fundamental goal of physics is an understanding of the forces of nature in their simplest and most general terms. Yet there is much more involved than just a basic set of equations which eventually has to be solved when applied to specific problems. We have learned in recent years that the structure of the ground state of field theories (with which we are generally concerned) plays an equally funda mental role as the equations of motion themselves. Heisenberg was probably the first to recognize that the ground state, the vacuum, could acquire certain prop erties (quantum numbers) when he devised a theory of ferromagnetism. Since then, many more such examples are known in solid state physics, e. g. supercon ductivity, superfluidity, in fact all problems concerned with phase transitions of many-body systems, which are often summarized under the name synergetics. Inspired by the experimental observation that also fundamental symmetries, such as parity or chiral symmetry, may be violated in nature, it has become wide ly accepted that the same field theory may be based on different vacua. Practical ly all these different field phases have the status of more or less hypothetical models, not (yet) directly accessible to experiments. There is one magnificent ex ception and this is the change of the ground state (vacuum) of the electron-posi tron field in superstrong electric fields.

Author: Peter W. Milonni
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0080571492
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
In modern physics, the classical vacuum of tranquil nothingness has been replaced by a quantum vacuum with fluctuations of measurable consequence. In The Quantum Vacuum, Peter Milonni describes the concept of the vacuum in quantum physics with an emphasis on quantum electrodynamics. He elucidates in depth and detail the role of the vacuum electromagnetic field in spontaneous emission, the Lamb shift, van der Waals, and Casimir forces, and a variety of other phenomena, some of which are of technological as well as purely scientific importance. This informative text also provides an introduction based on fundamental vacuum processes to the ideas of relativistic quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, including renormalization and Feynman diagrams. Experimental as well as theoreticalaspects of the quantum vacuum are described, and in most cases details of mathematical derivations are included. Chapter 1 of The Quantum Vacuum - published in advance in The American Journal of Physics (1991)-was later selected by readers as one of the Most Memorable papers ever published in the 60-year history of the journal. This chapter provides anexcellent beginning of the book, introducing a wealth of information of historical interest, the results of which are carefully woven into subsequent chapters to form a coherent whole. Does not assume that the reader has taken advanced graduate courses, making the text accessible to beginning graduate students Emphasizes the basic physical ideas rather than the formal, mathematical aspects of the subject Provides a careful and thorough treatment of Casimir and van der Waals forces at a level of detail not found in any other book on this topic Clearly presents mathematical derivations

Author: Viatcheslav Mukhanov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521868341
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Author: Walter Dittrich
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 354045585X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book is devoted to an investigation of the vacuum of quantum elec trodynamics (QED), relying on the perturbative effective action approach. If the vacuum is probed with external perturbations, the response of the system can be analyzed after averaging over the high energy degrees of freedom. This results in an effective description of the properties of the vacuum, which are comparable to the properties of a classical medium. We concentrate primarily on the physics of slowly varying fields or soft photons by integrating out the high energy degrees of freedom, i.e. the elec trons, employing Schwinger's proper time method. We derive a new represen tation of the one loop photon polarization tensor, coupling to all orders to an arbitrary constant electromagnetic field, fully maintaining the dependence on the complete set of invariants. On the basis of effective Lagrangians, we derive the light cone condition for low frequency photons propagating in strong fields. Our formalism can be extended to various external perturbations, such as temperature and Casimir situations. We give a proof of the "unified formula" for low energy phenom ena that describes the refractive indices of various perturbed quantum vacua. In the high energy domain, we observe similarities between a vacuum with a superstrong magnetic field and a magnetized plasma. The question of mea surability of the various effects is addressed; a violation of causality is not found.

Author: Felix Karbstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The physical vacuum of a relativistic quantum field theory amounts to a non-trivial quantum state. It encodes information about the full particle content of the underlying microscopic theory in the form of virtual processes, also referred to as vacuum fluctuations. If the theory features charged particles, fluctuations of the latter give rise to nonlinear effective couplings between electromagnetic fields that vanish in the formal limit of a vanishing Planck constant, but persist for a nonzero physical value. In turn, they inherently modify Maxwell's linear theory of classical electrodynamics. However, for the field strengths reached by macroscopic electromagnetic fields currently available in the laboratory the quantum vacuum nonlinearities induced by Standard Model particles are parametrically suppressed relatively to the linear contribution by inverse powers of the electron mass and thus very small. As a consequence, this fundamental tenet has remained experimentally challenging and is yet to be tested in the laboratory. The present work is devoted to the study of quantum vacuum nonlinearities in strong electromagnetic fields arising from quantum electrodynamics. It provides a detailed account of the state of the art of analytical theory. On the one hand, it focuses on fundamental theoretical aspects concerning the structure and behavior of the Heisenberg-Euler effective action, which supersedes the classical Maxwell action in governing the physics of strong macroscopic electromagnetic fields in the quantum vacuum. On the other hand, it is concerned with questions of direct phenomenological relevance like the systematic study of photonic quantum vacuum signals accessible with state-of-the-art laser technology.

Author: Efim Samoĭlovich Fradkin
Publisher: Springer Series in Synergetics
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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This book contains a systematic analysis of the formalisms of quantum electro- dynamics in the presence of an intense external field able to create pairs from the vacuum, and thereby violate the stability of the latter. The approach developed is not specific to quantum electrodynamics, and can equally well be applied to any quantum field theory with an unstable vacuum. It should be noted that only macroscopic external fields are considered, whereas problems associated with the superstrong Coulomb (micro) field are not treated. As a rule, the discussion is confined to those details of the formalism and calculations that are specific to the instability property. For instance, renormalization is not discussed here since, in practical calculations, it is carried out according to standard methods. The presentation is based mainly on original research undertaken by the authors. Chapter 1 contains a general introduction to the problem. It also presents some standard information on quantum electrodynamics, which will be used later in the text. In addition, an interpretation of the concept of an external field is given, and the problems that arise when one tries to keep the interaction with the external field exactly are discussed. In Chapter 2, the perturbation expansion in powers of the radiative interac- tion is developed for the matrix elements of transition processes, taking the arbitrary external field into account exactly.

Author: Viatcheslav Mukhanov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139788949
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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This book, first published in 2007, is an introductory textbook on quantum field theory in gravitational backgrounds intended for undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the fields of theoretical astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and string theory. The book covers the basic (but essential) material of quantization of fields in an expanding universe and quantum fluctuations in inflationary spacetime. It also contains a detailed explanation of the Casimir, Unruh, and Hawking effects, and introduces the method of effective action used for calculating the back-reaction of quantum systems on a classical external gravitational field. The broad scope of the material covered will provide the reader with a thorough perspective of the subject. Every major result is derived from first principles and thoroughly explained. The book is self-contained and assumes only a basic knowledge of general relativity. Exercises with detailed solutions are provided throughout the book.