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Register a new userQuantum Mechanics in Noninertial Reference Frames: Violations of the Nonrelativistic Equivalence Principle
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Added by
Sujeev Wickramasekara
Publication date
2013
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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In previous work we have developed a formulation of quantum mechanics in non-inertial reference frames. This formulation is grounded in a class of unitary cocycle representations of what we have called the Galilean line group, the generalization of the Galilei group that includes transformations amongst non-inertial reference frames. These representations show that in quantum mechanics, just as is the case in classical mechanics, the transformations to accelerating reference frames give rise to fictitious forces. A special feature of these previously constructed representations is that they all respect the non-relativistic equivalence principle, wherein the fictitious forces associated with linear acceleration can equivalently be described by gravitational forces. In this paper we exhibit a large class of cocycle representations of the Galilean line group that violate the equivalence principle. Nevertheless the classical mechanics analogue of these cocycle representations all respect the equivalence principle.
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This is the fourth in a series of papers on developing a formulation of quantum mechanics in non-inertial reference frames. This formulation is grounded in a class of unitary cocycle representations of what we have called the Galilean line group, the generalization of the Galilei group to include transformations amongst non-inertial reference frames. These representations show that in quantum mechanics, just as the case in classical mechanics, the transformations to accelerating reference frames give rise to fictitious forces. In previous work, we have shown that there exist representations of the Galilean line group that uphold the non-relativistic equivalence principle as well as representations that violate the equivalence principle. In these previous studies, the focus was on linear accelerations. In this paper, we undertake an extension of the formulation to include rotational accelarations. We show that the incorporation of rotational accelerations requires a class of emph{loop prolongations} of the Galilean line group and their unitary cocycle representations. We recover the centrifugal and Coriolis force effects from these loop representations. Loops are more general than groups in that their multiplication law need not be associative. Hence, our broad theoretical claim is that a Galilean quantum theory that holds in arbitrary non-inertial reference frames requires going beyond groups and group representations, the well-stablished framework for implementing symmetry transformations in quantum mechanics.
The Landauer principle asserts that the energy cost of erasure of one bit of information by the action of a thermal reservoir in equilibrium at temperature T is never less than $kTlog 2$. We discuss Landauers principle for quantum statistical models describing a finite level quantum system S coupled to an infinitely extended thermal reservoir R. Using Arakis perturbation theory of KMS states and the Avron-Elgart adiabatic theorem we prove, under a natural ergodicity assumption on the joint system S+R, that Landauers bound saturates for adiabatically switched interactions. The recent work of Reeb and Wolf on the subject is discussed and compared.
We present a formalism of Galilean quantum mechanics in non-inertial reference frames and discuss its implications for the equivalence principle. This extension of quantum mechanics rests on the Galilean line group, the semidirect product of the real line and the group of analytic functions from the real line to the Euclidean group in three dimensions. This group provides transformations between all inertial and non-inertial reference frames and contains the Galilei group as a subgroup. We construct a certain class of unitary representations of the Galilean line group and show that these representations determine the structure of quantum mechanics in non-inertial reference frames. Our representations of the Galilean line group contain the usual unitary projective representations of the Galilei group, but have a more intricate cocycle structure. The transformation formula for the Hamiltonian under the Galilean line group shows that in a non-inertial reference frame it acquires a fictitious potential energy term that is proportional to the inertial mass, suggesting the equivalence of inertial mass and gravitational mass in quantum mechanics.
We show that the Wigner-Bargmann program of grounding non-relativistic quantum mechanics in the unitary projective representations of the Galilei group can be extended to include all non-inertial reference frames. The key concept is the emph{Galilean line group}, the group of transformations that ties together all accelerating reference frames, and its representations. These representations are constructed under the natural constraint that they reduce to the well-known unitary, projective representations of the Galilei group when the transformations are restricted to inertial reference frames. This constraint can be accommodated only for a class of representations with a sufficiently rich cocycle structure. Unlike the projective representations of the Galilei group, these cocycle representations of the Galilean line group do not correspond to central extensions of the group. Rather, they correspond to a class of non-associative extensions, known as emph{loop prolongations}, that are determined by three-cocycles. As an application, we show that the phase shifts due to the rotation of the earth that have been observed in neutron interferometry experiments and the rotational effects that lead to simulated magnetic fields in optical lattices can be rigorously derived from the representations of the loop prolongations of the Galilean line group.
Quantum decoherence, which appears when a system interacts with its environment in an irreversible way, plays a fundamental role in the description of quantum-to-classical transitions and has been successfully applied in some important experiments. Here, we study the decoherence in noninertial frames for the first time. It is shown that the decoherence and loss of the entanglement generated by the Unruh effect will influence each other remarkably. It is interesting to note that in the case of the total system under decoherence, the sudden death of entanglement may appear for any acceleration. However, in the case of only Robs qubit underging decoherence sudden death may only occur when the acceleration parameter is greater than a critical point.
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