Quantum Electrodynamics of Strong Fields [electronic resource] : With an Introduction into Modern Relativistic Quantum Mechanics / by Walter Greiner, Berndt Müller, Johann Rafelski.
The fundamental goal of physics is an understanding of the forces of nature in their simplest and most general terms. Yet there is much more involved than just a basic set of equations which eventually has to be solved when applied to specific problems. We have learned in recent years that the struc...
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Full Text (via Springer) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Other Authors: | , |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Berlin, Heidelberg :
Springer Berlin Heidelberg,
1985.
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| Series: | Texts and monographs in physics.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | The fundamental goal of physics is an understanding of the forces of nature in their simplest and most general terms. Yet there is much more involved than just a basic set of equations which eventually has to be solved when applied to specific problems. We have learned in recent years that the structure of the ground state of field theories (with which we are generally concerned) plays an equally funda mental role as the equations of motion themselves. Heisenberg was probably the first to recognize that the ground state, the vacuum, could acquire certain prop erties (quantum numbers) when he devised a theory of ferromagnetism. Since then, many more such examples are known in solid state physics, e. g. supercon ductivity, superfluidity, in fact all problems concerned with phase transitions of many-body systems, which are often summarized under the name synergetics. Inspired by the experimental observation that also fundamental symmetries, such as parity or chiral symmetry, may be violated in nature, it has become wide ly accepted that the same field theory may be based on different vacua. Practical ly all these different field phases have the status of more or less hypothetical models, not (yet) directly accessible to experiments. There is one magnificent ex ception and this is the change of the ground state (vacuum) of the electron-posi tron field in superstrong electric fields. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| ISBN: | 9783642822728 364282272X 9783642822742 3642822746 |
| ISSN: | 1864-5879 |