Dirac Particles in Twisted Tubes

✍ Scribed by P. Ouyang; V. Mohta; R.L. Jaffe

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 192 KB
• Volume: 275
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-4916
• DOI: 10.1006/aphy.1999.5935

✦ Synopsis

We consider the dynamics of a relativistic Dirac particle constrained to move in the interior of a twisted tube by confining boundary conditions, in the approximation that the curvature of the tube is small and slowly varying. In contrast with the nonrelativistic theory, which predicts that a particle's spin does not change as the particle propagates along the tube, we find that the angular momentum eigenstates of a relativistic spin 1 2 particle may behave nontrivially. For example, a particle with its angular momentum initially polarized in the direction of propagation may acquire a nonzero component of angular momentum in the opposite direction on turning through 2? radians. Also, the usual nonrelativistic effective potential acquires an additional factor in the relativistic theory.