No Arabic abstract
A unified account, from a pedagogical perspective, is given of the longitudinal and transverse projective delta functions proposed by Belinfante and of their relation to the Helmholtz theorem for the decomposition of a three-vector field into its longitudinal and transverse components. It is argued that the results are applicable to fields that are time-dependent as well as fields that are time-independent.
The magnetic moment of a particle orbiting a straight current-carrying wire may precess rapidly enough in the wires magnetic field to justify an adiabatic approximation, eliminating the rapid time dependence of the magnetic moment and leaving only the particle position as a slow degree of freedom. To zeroth order in the adiabatic expansion, the orbits of the particle in the plane perpendicular to the wire are Keplerian ellipses. Higher order post-adiabatic corrections make the orbits precess, but recent analysis of this `vector Kepler problem has shown that the effective Hamiltonian incorporating a post-adiabatic scalar potential (`geometric electromagnetism) fails to predict the precession correctly, while a heuristic alternative succeeds. In this paper we resolve the apparent failure of the post-adiabatic approximation, by pointing out that the correct second-order analysis produces a third Hamiltonian, in which geometric electromagnetism is supplemented by a tensor potential. The heuristic Hamiltonian of Schmiedmayer and Scrinzi is then shown to be a canonical transformation of the correct adiabatic Hamiltonian, to second order. The transformation has the important advantage of removing a $1/r^3$ singularity which is an artifact of the adiabatic approximation.
A decomposition of the angular momentum of the classical electromagnetic field into orbital and spin components that is manifestly gauge invariant and general has been obtained. This is done by decomposing the electric field into its longitudinal and transverse parts by means of the Helmholtz theorem. The orbital and spin components of the angular momentum of any specified electromagnetic field can be found from this prescription.
The accurate modeling of the dielectric properties of water is crucial for many applications in physics, computational chemistry and molecular biology. This becomes possible in the framework of nonlocal electrostatics, for which we propose a novel formulation allowing for numerical solutions for the nontrivial molecular geometries arising in the applications mentioned before. Our approach is based on the introduction of a secondary field, $psi$, which acts as the potential for the rotation free part of the dielectric displacement field ${bf D}$. For many relevant models, the dielectric function of the medium can be expressed as the Greens function of a local differential operator. In this case, the resulting coupled Poisson (-Boltzmann) equations for $psi$ and the electrostatic potential $phi$ reduce to a system of coupled PDEs. The approach is illustrated by its application to simple geometries.
By using fundamental units c, h, G as conversion factors one can easily transform the dimensions of all observables. In particular one can make them all ``geometrical, or dimensionless. However this has no impact on the fact that there are three fundamental units, G being one of them. Only experiment can tell us whether G is basically fundamental.
Calculations are carried out for the scattering of heavy rare gas atoms with surfaces using a recently developed classical theory that can track particles trapped in the physisorption potential well and follow them until ultimate desorption. Comparisons are made with recent experimental data for xenon scattering from molten gallium and indium, systems for which the rare gas is heavier than the surface atoms. The good agreement with the data obtained for both time-of-flight energy-resolved spectra and for total scattered angular distributions yields an estimate of the physisorption well depths for the two systems.