The Thomas rotation

Details The Thomas rotation The Thomas rotation

2001-02-20

arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0102244v1

Am.J.Phys.69:837-847,2001

Physics

High Energy Physics

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

20 pages, plain LaTeX, no figures, no macros, no style sheets

Scientific paper

10.1119/1.1371010

We review why the Thomas rotation is a crucial facet of special relativity, that is just as fundamental, and just as "unintuitive" and "paradoxical", as such traditional effects as length contraction, time dilation, and the ambiguity of simultaneity. We show how this phenomenon can be quite naturally introduced and investigated in the context of a typical introductory course on special relativity, in a way that is appropriate for, and completely accessible to, undergraduate students. We also demonstrate, in a more advanced section aimed at the graduate student studying the Dirac equation and relativistic quantum field theory, that careful consideration of the Thomas rotation will become vital as modern experiments in particle physics continue to move from unpolarized to polarized cross-sections.

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