Extremes of nuclear structure

With the advent of medium and large gamma detector arrays, it is now possible to look at nuclear structure at high rotational forces. The role of pairing correlations and their eventual breakdown, along with the shell effects have showed us the interesting physics for nuclei at high spins — superdeformation, shape co-existence, yrast traps, alignments and their dramatic effects on nuclear structure and so on. Nuclear structure studies have recently become even more exciting, due to efforts and possibilities to reach nuclei far off from the stability valley. Coupling of gamma ray arrays with ‘filters’, like neutron wall, charged particle detector array, gamma ray total energy and multiplicity castles, conversion electron spectrometers etc gives a great handle to study nuclei produced online with ‘low’ cross-sections. Recently we studied, nuclei in mass region 80 using an array of 8 germanium detectors in conjunction with the recoil mass analyser, HIRA at the Nuclear Science Centre and, most unexpectedly came across the phenomenon of identical bands, with two quasi-particle difference. The discovery of magnetic rotation is another highlight. Our study of light In nucleus, 107In brought us face to face with the ‘dipole’ bands. I plan to discuss some of these aspects. There is also an immensely important development — that of the ‘radioactive ion beams’. The availability of RIB, will probably very dramatically influence our ‘conventional’ concept of nuclear structure. The exotic shapes of these exotic nuclei and some of their expected properties will also be touched upon.     

Quasi-Conformal Actions,Quaternionic Discrete Series and Twistors: <Emphasis Type="Italic">SU</Emphasis>(2, 1) and <Emphasis Type="Italic">G</Emphasis><Subscript>2(2)</Subscript>

Quasi-conformal actions were introduced in the physics literature as a generalization of the familiar fractional linear action on the upper half plane, to Hermitian symmetric tube domains based on arbitrary Jordan algebras, and further to arbitrary Freudenthal triple systems. In the mathematics literature, quaternionic discrete series unitary representations of real reductive groups in their quaternionic real form were constructed as degree 1 cohomology on the twistor spaces of symmetric quaternionic-Kähler spaces. These two constructions are essentially identical, as we show explicitly for the two rank 2 cases SU(2, 1) and G ₂₍₂₎. We obtain explicit results for certain principal series, quaternionic discrete series and minimal representations of these groups, including formulas for the lowest K-types in various polarizations. We expect our results to have applications to topological strings, black hole micro-state counting and to the theory of automorphic forms.     

Classical topology and quantum states

Any two infinite-dimensional (separable) Hilbert spaces are unitarily isomorphic. The sets of all their self-adjoint operators are also therefore unitarily equivalent. Thus if all self-adjoint operators can be observed, and if there is no further major axiom in quantum physics than those formulated for example in Dirac’s ‘quantum mechanics’, then a quantum physicist would not be able to tell a torus from a hole in the ground. We argue that there are indeed such axioms involving observables with smooth time evolution: they contain commutative subalgebras from which the spatial slice of spacetime with its topology (and with further refinements of the axiom, its C ^K - and C ^--structures) can be reconstructed using Gel’fand-Naimark theory and its extensions. Classical topology is an attribute of only certain quantum observables for these axioms, the spatial slice emergent from quantum physics getting progressively less differentiable with increasingly higher excitations of energy and eventually altogether ceasing to exist. After formulating these axioms, we apply them to show the possibility of topology change and to discuss quantized fuzzy topologies. Fundamental issues concerning the role of time in quantum physics are also addressed.     

Generalized Fock spaces,new forms of quantum statistics and their algebras

We formulate a theory of generalized Fock spaces which underlies the different forms of quantum statistics such as ‘infinite’, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics. Single-indexed systems as well as multi-indexed systems that cannot be mapped into single-indexed systems are studied. Our theory is based on a three-tiered structure consisting of Fock space, statistics and algebra. This general formalism not only unifies the various forms of statistics and algebras, but also allows us to construct many new forms of quantum statistics as well as many algebras of creation and destruction operators. Some of these are: new algebras for infinite statistics,q-statistics and its many avatars, a consistent algebra for fractional statistics, null statistics or statistics of frozen order, ‘doubly-infinite’ statistics, many representations of orthostatistics, Hubbard statistics and its variations.     

Coherence vs. decoherence in (some) problems of condensed matter physics

We present an ‘overview’ of coherence-to-decoherence transition in certain selected problems of condensed matter physics. Our treatment is based on a subsystem-plus-environment approach. All the examples chosen in this paper have one thing in common — the environmental degrees of freedom are taken to be bosonic and their spectral density of excitations is assumed to be ‘ohmic’. The examples are drawn from a variety of phenomena in condensed matter physics involving, for instance, quantum diffusion of hydrogen in metals, Landau diamagnetism and c-axis transport in high T _c superconductors.     

Covariance and Quantum Logic

Considering the fundamental role symmetry plays throughout physics, it is remarkable how little attention has been paid to it in the quantum-logical literature. In this paper, we discuss G-test spaces—that is, test spaces hosting an action by a group G—and their logics. The focus is on G-test spaces having strong homogeneity properties. After establishing some general results and exhibiting various specimens (some of them exotic), we show that a sufficiently symmetric G-test space having an invariant, separating set of states with affine dimension n, is always representable in terms of a real Hilbert space of dimension n+1, in such a way that orthogonal outcomes are represented by orthogonal unit vectors.     

Planck’s Constant in the Light of Quantum Logic

The goal of quantum logic is the “bottom-top” reconstruction of quantum mechanics. Starting from a weak quantum ontology, a long sequence of arguments leads to quantum logic, to an orthomodular lattice, and to the classical Hilbert spaces. However, this abstract theory does not yet contain Planck’s constant ℏ. We argue, that ℏ can be obtained, if the empty theory is applied to real entities and extended by concepts that are usually considered as classical notions. Introducing the concepts of localizability and homogeneity we define objects by symmetry groups and systems of imprimitivity. For elementary systems, the irreducible representations of the Galileo group are projective and determined only up to a parameter z, which is given by z=m/ℏ, where m is the mass of the particle and ℏ Planck’s constant. We show that ℏ has a meaning within quantum mechanics, irrespective of use the of classical concepts in our derivation.     

Wigner-Type Theorems for Projections

The Wigner theorem, in its Uhlhorn’s formulation, states that a bijective transformation of the set of all one-dimensional linear subspaces of a complex Hilbert space which preserves orthogonality is induced by either a unitary or an antiunitary operator. There exist in the literature many Wigner-type theorems and the purpose of this paper is to prove in an algebraic setting a very general Wigner-type theorem for projections (idempotent linear mappings). As corollaries, Wigner-type theorems for projections in real locally convex spaces, infinite dimensional complex normed spaces and Hilbert spaces are obtained.     

Quantization of Diffeomorphism Invariant Theories of Connections with a Non-Compact Structure Group—an Example

A simple diffeomorphism invariant theory of connections with the non-compact structure group of real numbers is quantized. The theory is defined on a four-dimensional ‘space-time’ by an action resembling closely the self-dual Plebański action for general relativity. The space of quantum states is constructed by means of projective techniques by Kijowski [1]. Except for this point the applied quantization procedure is based on Loop Quantum Gravity methods.     

Self-Dual Transitive Spin 1/2 Models

Most general self-dual spin 1/2 models in any dimension, with interaction that is translation-invariant in a suitable sense (‘transitive models’), are determined. In the process of classification of such systems, a class of models which are self-dual in a particularly strong sense is introduced.     

Quantum mechanics of the quaternionic Hilbert spaces based upon the imprimitivity theorem

We survey the realization of quantum mechanics in quaternionic Hilbert spaces following the methods of Mackey, who examined the complex and real cases exploiting the imprimitivity theorem. We show that there exists a unique unitary skew-adjoint operator which commutes with all the observables. This operator not only plays the role of the imaginary unit in the complex case, but allows a complexification of the Hilbert space by the choice of any quaternionic imaginary unit. Difficulties in the definition of time reversal, however, arise because of the properties of the quaternionic field. The introduction of an extra imaginary unit, commuting with the others, is suggested in order to implement time reversal properly. In the Appendix we give the proof of the imprimitivity theorem, in the quaternionic case, that we use in the paper.     

On Consistency of the Quantum-Like Representation Algorithm

In this paper we continue to study so-called “inverse Born’s rule problem”: to construct a representation of probabilistic data of any origin by a complex probability amplitude which matches Born’s rule. The corresponding algorithm—quantum-like representation algorithm (QLRA)—was recently proposed by A. Khrennikov (Found. Phys. 35(10):1655–1693, 2005; Physica E 29:226–236, 2005; Dokl. Akad. Nauk 404(1):33–36, 2005; J. Math. Phys. 46(6):062111–062124, 2005; Europhys. Lett. 69(5):678–684, 2005). Formally QLRA depends on the order of conditioning. For two observables (of any origin, e.g., physical or biological) a and b, b|a- and a|b conditional probabilities produce two representations, say in Hilbert spaces H ^b|a and H ^a|b . In this paper we prove that under “natural assumptions” (which hold, e.g., for quantum observables represented by operators with nondegenerate spectra) these two representations are unitary equivalent. This result proves the consistency of QLRA.     

Some mathematical aspects of the scaling limit of critical two-dimensional systems

It has been observed long ago that many systems from statistical physics behave randomly on macroscopic level at their critical temperature. In two dimensions, these phenomena have been classified by theoretical physicists thanks to conformal field theory, that led to the derivation of the exact value of various critical exponents that describe their behavior near the critical temperature. In the last couple of years, combining ideas of complex analysis and probability theory, mathematicians have constructed and studied a family of random fractals (called ‘Schramm-Loewner evolutions’ or SLE) that describe the only possible conformally invariant limits of the interfaces for these models. This gives a concrete construction of these random systems, puts various predictions on a rigorous footing, and leads to further understanding of their behavior. The goal of this paper is to survey some of these recent mathematical developments, and to describe a couple of basic underlying ideas. We will also briefly describe some very recent and ongoing developments relating SLE, Brownian loop soups and conformal field theory.     

Topos theory and consistent histories: The internal logic of the set of all consistent sets

A major problem in the consistent-histories approach to quantum theory is contending with the potentially large number of consistent sets of history propositions. One possibility is to find a scheme in which a unique set is selected in some way. However, in this paper the alternative approach is considered in which all consistent sets are kept, leading to a type of ‘many-world-views’ picture of the quantum theory. It is shown that a natural way of handling this situation is to employ the theory of varying sets (presheafs) on the spaceB of all nontrivial Boolean subalgebras of the orthoalgebraUP of history propositions. This approach automatically includes the feature whereby probabilistic predictions are meaningful only in the context of a consistent set of history propositions. More strikingly, it leads to a picture in which the ‘truth values’ or ‘semantic values’ of such contextual predictions are not just two-valued (i.e., true and false) but instead lie in a larger logical algebra—a Heyting algebra—whose structure is determined by the spaceB of Boolean subalgebras ofUP. This topos-theoretic structure thereby gives a coherent mathematical framework in which to understand the internal logic of the many-world-views picture that arises naturally in the approach to quantum theory based on the ideas of consistent histories.     

Complementarity in Categorical Quantum Mechanics

We relate notions of complementarity in three layers of quantum mechanics: (i) von Neumann algebras, (ii) Hilbert spaces, and (iii) orthomodular lattices. Taking a more general categorical perspective of which the above are instances, we consider dagger monoidal kernel categories for (ii), so that (i) become (sub)endohomsets and (iii) become subobject lattices. By developing a ‘point-free’ definition of copyability we link (i) commutative von Neumann subalgebras, (ii) classical structures, and (iii) Boolean subalgebras.     

All basic condensed matter physics phenomena and notions mirror in biology — A hypothesis,two examples and a novel prediction

A few billion years of evolutionary time and the complex process of ‘selection’ has given biology an opportunity to explore a variety of condensed matter phenomena and situations, some of which have been discovered by humans in the laboratory, that too only in extreme non-biological conditions such as low temperatures, high purity, high pressure etc., in the last centuries. Biology, at some level, is a complex and self-regulated condensed matter system compared to the ‘inanimate’ condensed matter systems such as liquid ⁴He, liquid water or a piece of graphite. In this article I propose a hypothesis that ‘all basic condensed matter physics phenomena and notions (already known and ones yet to be discovered) mirror in biology’. I explain this hypothesis by considering the idea of ‘Bose condensation’ or ‘momentum space order’ and discuss two known example of quantum magnetism encountered in biology. I also provide some new and rather speculative possibility, from light harvesting in biological photosynthesis, of mesoscopic excition condensation related phenomena at room temperature.     

Soler's Theorem and Characterization of Inner Product Spaces

Using Soler's result, we show that the existenceof at least one finitely additive probability measure onthe system of all orthogonally closed subspaces of Swhich is concentrated on a one-dimensional subspace of E can imply that E is a real,complex, or quaternionic Hilbert space. In addition,using the concept of test spaces of Foulis and Randalland introducing various systems of subspaces of E , we give some characterizations of inner productspaces which imply that E is a real, complex, orquaternionic Hilbert space.