Recent content by marmoset

On the mathematical side it may be worth mentioning there are formalizations of our intuitive notion of frequency/wavelength which do allow them to be localized (see e.g. the spectrogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram and time frequency analysis) and which allow you to meaningfully...

I'm no expert but a sketch of the arguments leading to the singularity theorems is given in chapter one of Hawking and Penrose's book 'The nature of space and time', which is the content of a series of lectures they gave together with a relatively easy going style (lots of easier sketches of...

I think this paper, 'A rigorous derivation of electromagnetic self force' by Gralla, Hart and Wald, is relevant here (cited 76 times). http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0905.2391

If I remember rightly there is a description in Pertti Lounesto's book Clifford Algebras and Spinors (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521005515/?tag=pfamazon01-20) of how a Pauli spinor field defines a basis at each point in three dimensional space and how a Dirac Spinor field is almost characterized...

In a plasma the beating of two light waves allows them to interact with a lower frequency wave in the plasma (electron or ion wave). If you fire a laser into a plasma these processes can scatter a lot of laser energy back out of the plasma (the processes are called stimulated Raman and...

You might find some help in Burke's book Applied Differential Geometry. He doesn't discuss the electromagnetic field lagrangian explicitly but he has a whole chapter on electromagnetism with differential forms and a section (six pages) on lagrangian field theory. The whole book will probably...

This paper http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Allendoerfer/1988/0025570x.di021152.02p01457.pdf by Bart Braden describes using the 'Polya vector field' associated with a complex function to visualize contour integrals. The Polya vector field associated with a complex...

I think it is possible to rewrite Maxwell's equation in a form (a symmetric, hyperbolic form) which let's you apply a general theorem on existence and uniqueness for such partial differential equations. I read about this in Geroch's paper "Partial Differential Equations of Physics", available...

I think what you are looking for is the concept of exterior and symmetric powers of a vector space. If your one particle Hilbert space is H, the Hilbert space for n fermions is the nth exterior power of H, and the Hilbert space for n bosons is the nth symmetric power of H. These terms are...

I know this comment was tongue in cheek, but for the record Jaynes' work on QED led to him proposing the now extremely widely used Jaynes-Cummings model, which is "of great interest in atomic physics, quantum optics, and solid-state quantum information circuits, both experimentally and...

This is beyond me but I think the book Peter Woit is preparing (current version available here http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/qmbook.pdf) might interest you. From the preface:

It is interesting that a photon wavefunction very closely related to the Maxwell field can be defined (as mentioned earlier in the thread). It is very interesting that the two photon wavefunction built from these one photon wavefunctions reproduces previous results of classical coherence theory...

Anyone who is confused by this is in good company - Bill Burke dedicates his book on applied differential geometry to "all those who, like me, have wondered how in hell you can change ##\dot q## without changing ##q##".

I believe the microscopic magnetization in iron for example can be measured by spin-polarized neutron scattering. My reference is the article 'The microscopic magnetization: concept and application' by L.L. Hirst which begins by discussing the view that magnetization is a macroscopic quantity...

The book 'Electromagnetic theory' by Attay Kovetz has a section (23) on relativistic response functions. Incidentally although Kovetz's book is mostly on macroscopic electromagnetism, its definitions of P and M as 'charge-current potentials' agree with the microscopic definitions given in post...