Modern Physics Letters A

The quantum jump method for the calculation of geometric phase is reviewed. This is an operational method to associate a geometric phase to the evolution of a quantum system subjected to decoherence in an open system. The method is general and can be applied to many different physical systems, within the Markovian approximation. As examples, two main source of decoherence are considered: dephasing and spontaneous decay. It is shown that the geometric phase is to very large extent insensitive to the former, i.e. it is independent of the number of jumps determined by the dephasing operator.

The one-loop effective energy density of a pure SU(2) Yang–Mills theory in the Savvidy background is reconsidered. The stable and the unstable modes are identified. The stable modes are treated in the quadratic approximation. For the unstable modes, the full expansion including the cubic and the quartic terms in the fluctuations is used. The functional integral for the unstable modes is evaluated and added to the result for the stable modes. The resulting energy density coincides with the real part in the quadratic approximation of earlier studies and there is now no imaginary part.

Using an algebraic formulation, we explore two well-known degeneracies involving the mass-squared differences for three-neutrino oscillations assuming CP symmetry is conserved. For vacuum oscillation, we derive the expression for the mixing angles that permit invariance under the interchange of two mass-squared differences. This symmetry is most easily expressed in terms of an ascending mass order. This can be used to reduce the parameter space by one half in the absence of the MSW effect. For oscillations in matter, we derive within our formalism the known approximate degeneracy between the standard and inverted mass hierarchies in the limit of vanishing θ₁₃. This is done with a mass ordering that permits the map Δ₃₁↦-Δ₃₁. Our techniques allow us to translate mixing angles in this mass order convention into their values for the ascending order convention. Using this dictionary, we demonstrate that the vacuum symmetry and the approximate symmetry invoked for oscillations in matter are distinctly different.

In this paper, Parikh's recent work, which treats Hawking radiation as a tunneling process in a spherically symmetric spacetime, is extended to the stationary axisymmetric Kerr spacetime. A generalized Painleve coordinate system (Painleve–Kerr coordinates) is introduced. The new coordinates are well-behaved at the event horizon. Constant-time slices are just flat Euclidean space in radial and satisfy Landau's condition of clock synchronization. The tunneling process across the Kerr black hole event horizon is investigated and the correctd radiation spectrum is obtained. The result is consistent with an underlying unitary theory.

An algebraic nonperturbative approach is proposed for the analytical treatment of Schrödinger equations with a potential that can be expressed in terms of an exactly solvable piece with an additional potential. Avoiding disadvantages of standard approaches, new handy recursion formulas with the same simple form both for ground and excited states have been obtained. As an illustration the procedure, well adapted to the use of computer algebra, is successfully applied to quartic anharmonic oscillators by means of very simple algebraic manipulations. The trend of the exact values of the energies is rather well reproduced for a large range of values of the coupling constant (g = 0.001–10000).

We propose a way of unambiguously parallel transporting fields on non-Abelian flux tubes, or strings, by means of two gauge fields. One gauge field transports along the tube, while the other transports normal to the tube. Ambiguity is removed by imposing an integrability condition on the pair of fields. The construction leads to a gauge theory of mathematical objects known as Lie 2-groups, which are known to result also from the parallel transport of the flux tubes themselves. The integrability condition is also shown to be equivalent to the assumption that parallel transport along nearby string configurations are equal up to arbitrary gauge transformations. Attempts to implement this condition in a field theory leads to effective actions for two-form fields.

We discuss the structure of auxiliary fields for non-Abelian BF theories in arbitrary dimensions. By modifying the classical BRST operator, we build the on-shell invariant complete quantum action. Therefore, we introduce the auxiliary fields which close the BRST algebra and lead to the invariant extension of the classical action.