Thomas Curtright | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 (age 75–76) near Paris, Missouri |
Alma mater | University of Missouri Caltech |
Known for | Curtright field |
Scientific career | |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Feynman |
Thomas L. Curtright (born 1948) is a theoretical physicist at the University of Miami. He did undergraduate work in physics at the University of Missouri (B.S., M.S., 1970), and graduate work at Caltech (Ph.D., 1977) under the supervision of Richard Feynman.
He has made numerous influential contributions [1] in particle and mathematical physics, notably in supercurrent anomalies, [2] higher-spin fields (Curtright field), quantum Liouville theory, [3] geometrostatic sigma models, quantum algebras, and deformation quantization.
Curtright is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1998), a co-recipient (with Charles Thorn) of the SESAPS Jesse W. Beams Award (2005), a recipient of the SESAPS Francis G. Slack Award (2024), a University of Miami Cooper Fellow (2008), and a recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award from the University's Senate (2008). He is also the recipient of Distinguished Alumni Awards from the Department of Physics and Astronomy (2021) and from the College of Arts and Science (2022), University of Missouri at Columbia.
He has co-edited and co-authored several books, [4] notably on quantum mechanics in phase space. [5] [6]
Quantization is the systematic transition procedure from a classical understanding of physical phenomena to a newer understanding known as quantum mechanics. It is a procedure for constructing quantum mechanics from classical mechanics. A generalization involving infinite degrees of freedom is field quantization, as in the "quantization of the electromagnetic field", referring to photons as field "quanta". This procedure is basic to theories of atomic physics, chemistry, particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum optics.
The phase space of a physical system is the set of all possible physical states of the system when described by a given parameterization. Each possible state corresponds uniquely to a point in the phase space. For mechanical systems, the phase space usually consists of all possible values of the position and momentum parameters. It is the direct product of direct space and reciprocal space. The concept of phase space was developed in the late 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri Poincaré, and Josiah Willard Gibbs.
The classical limit or correspondence limit is the ability of a physical theory to approximate or "recover" classical mechanics when considered over special values of its parameters. The classical limit is used with physical theories that predict non-classical behavior.
In mathematics, Nambu mechanics is a generalization of Hamiltonian mechanics involving multiple Hamiltonians. Recall that Hamiltonian mechanics is based upon the flows generated by a smooth Hamiltonian over a symplectic manifold. The flows are symplectomorphisms and hence obey Liouville's theorem. This was soon generalized to flows generated by a Hamiltonian over a Poisson manifold. In 1973, Yoichiro Nambu suggested a generalization involving Nambu–Poisson manifolds with more than one Hamiltonian.
David Louis Goodstein was an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
The Wigner quasiprobability distribution is a quasiprobability distribution. It was introduced by Eugene Wigner in 1932 to study quantum corrections to classical statistical mechanics. The goal was to link the wavefunction that appears in Schrödinger's equation to a probability distribution in phase space.
A conformal anomaly, scale anomaly, trace anomaly or Weyl anomaly is an anomaly, i.e. a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory.
In mathematics, the Moyal product is an example of a phase-space star product. It is an associative, non-commutative product, ★, on the functions on , equipped with its Poisson bracket. It is a special case of the ★-product of the "algebra of symbols" of a universal enveloping algebra.
George Frederick Chapline Jr. is an American theoretical physicist, based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His most recent interests have mainly been in quantum information theory, condensed matter, and quantum gravity. In 2003 he received the Computing Anticipatory Systems award for a new interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the similarity of quantum mechanics and Helmholtz machines. He was awarded the E. O. Lawrence Award in 1982 by the United States Department of Energy for leading the team that first demonstrated a working X-ray laser.
In quantum mechanics, the Wigner–Weyl transform or Weyl–Wigner transform is the invertible mapping between functions in the quantum phase space formulation and Hilbert space operators in the Schrödinger picture.
In mathematics and physics, deformation quantization roughly amounts to finding a (quantum) algebra whose classical limit is a given (classical) algebra such as a Lie algebra or a Poisson algebra.
José Enrique Moyal was an Australian mathematician and mathematical physicist who contributed to aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering and statistics, among other fields.
The non-critical string theory describes the relativistic string without enforcing the critical dimension. Although this allows the construction of a string theory in 4 spacetime dimensions, such a theory usually does not describe a Lorentz invariant background. However, there are recent developments which make possible Lorentz invariant quantization of string theory in 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time.
In physics, the Moyal bracket is the suitably normalized antisymmetrization of the phase-space star product.
Usually non-critical string theory is considered in frames of the approach proposed by Polyakov. The other approach has been developed in. It represents a universal method to maintain explicit Lorentz invariance in any quantum relativistic theory. On an example of Nambu-Goto string theory in 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time the idea can be demonstrated as follows:
The Husimi Q representation, introduced by Kôdi Husimi in 1940, is a quasiprobability distribution commonly used in quantum mechanics to represent the phase space distribution of a quantum state such as light in the phase space formulation. It is used in the field of quantum optics and particularly for tomographic purposes. It is also applied in the study of quantum effects in superconductors.
Cosmas K. Zachos is a theoretical physicist. He was educated in physics at Princeton University, and did graduate work in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of John Henry Schwarz.
Hilbrand Johannes "Hip" Groenewold (1910–1996) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who pioneered the largely operator-free formulation of quantum mechanics in phase space known as phase-space quantization.
The phase-space formulation is a formulation of quantum mechanics that places the position and momentum variables on equal footing in phase space. The two key features of the phase-space formulation are that the quantum state is described by a quasiprobability distribution and operator multiplication is replaced by a star product.
David B. Fairlie is a British mathematician and theoretical physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Durham (UK).