Poincaré group

Summary

The Poincaré group, named after Henri Poincaré (1906), was first defined by Hermann Minkowski (1908) as the group of Minkowski spacetime isometries. It is a ten-dimensional non-abelian Lie group that is of importance as a model in our understanding of the most basic fundamentals of physics. Overview A Minkowski spacetime isometry has the property that the interval between events is left invariant. For example, if everything were postponed by two hours, including the two events and the path you took to go from one to the other, then the time interval between the events recorded by a stop-watch you carried with you would be the same. Or if everything were shifted five kilometres to the west, or turned 60 degrees to the right, you would also see no change in the interval. It turns out that the proper length of an object is also unaffected by such a shift. A time or space reversal (a reflection) is also an isometry of this group. In Minkowski space (i.e. ignoring the effec

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_group

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The Galilei group involves mass as a central charge. We show that the associated superselection rule is incompatible with the observed phenomenology of superfluid helium 4: this is recovered only under the assumption that mass is spontaneou.519 broken. This remark is somewhat immaterial for the real world, where the correct space-time symmetries are encoded by the Poincare group, which has no central charge. Yet it provides an explicit example of how superselection rules can be experimentally tested. -We elaborate on what conditions must be met for our ideas to be generalizable to the relativistic case of the integer/half-integer angular momentum superselection rule.

Springer2015

The Uniformization Theorem due to Koebe and Poincaré implies that every compact Riemann surface of genus greater or equal to 2 can be endowed with a metric of constant curvature – 1. On the other hand, a compact Riemann surface is a complex algebraic curve and is therefore described by a polynomial equation with complex coefficients. The uniformization problem is then to link explicitly these two descriptions. In [BS05b], Peter Buser and Robert Silhol develop a new uniformization method for compact Riemann surfaces of genus two. Given such a surface S, the method describes a polynomial equation of an algebraic curve conformally equivalent to S. However, in this method appear a complex number τ BS and a function f BS which is holomorphic on the unit disk, both being characterized by some functional equations. This means that τ BS, f BS are given implicitly. P. Buser and R. Silhol then approximate them numerically by a complex number τ and a polynomial p using the approximation method developped in [BS05a]. In cases where the equation of the algebraic curve is known, they notice that these approximations are very good. In this thesis we prove a convergence theorem for the approximation method of P. Buser and R. Silhol, and we propose an adaptation of their method that allows to solve some of the numerical problems to which it is prone. Moreover, we generalize this uniformization method to hyperelliptic Riemann surfaces of genus greater than 2, and we give some examples of numerical uniformization in genus 3.

EPFL2010

General coordinate invariance in quantum many-body systems

Solomon G Shamsuddin Osman Endlich, Alexander Monin

We extend the notion of general coordinate invariance to many-body, not necessarily relativistic, systems. As an application, we investigate nonrelativistic general covariance in Galilei-invariant systems. The peculiar transformation rules for the background metric and gauge fields, first introduced by Son and Wingate in 2005 and refined in subsequent works, follow naturally from our framework. Our approach makes it clear that Galilei or Poincare symmetry is by no means a necessary prerequisite for making the theory invariant under coordinate diffeomorphisms. General covariance merely expresses the freedom to choose spacetime coordinates at will, whereas the true, physical symmetries of the system can be separately implemented as "internal" symmetries within the vielbein formalism. A systematic way to implement such symmetries is provided by the coset construction. We illustrate this point by applying our formalism to nonrelativistic s-wave superfluids.

Amer Physical Soc2014