Positronium Spectroscopy in a Magnetic Field

Hyperfine spectroscopy of positronium formed in the presence of a static magnetic field is considered. Generalising the situation hitherto developed in the literature, the magnetic field is not assumed to be parallel to the momentum of incoming polarised positrons, while the possibility of electron polarisation is also included in the analysis. The results are of application to high sensitivity positron polarimeters used in current $\beta$ decay experiments.Comment: 17 pages (LateX file; no extra macros needed

Quantisation without Gauge Fixing: Avoiding Gribov Ambiguities through the Physical Projector

The quantisation of gauge invariant systems usually proceeds through some gauge fixing procedure of one type or another. Typically for most cases, such gauge fixings are plagued by Gribov ambiguities, while it is only for an admissible gauge fixing that the correct dynamical description of the system is represented, especially with regards to non perturbative phenomena. However, any gauge fixing procedure whatsoever may be avoided altogether, by using rather a recently proposed new approach based on the projection operator onto physical gauge invariant states only, which is necessarily free on any such issues. These different aspects of gauge invariant systems are explicitely analysed within a solvable U(1) gauge invariant quantum mechanical model related to the dimensional reduction of Yang-Mills theory.Comment: 22 pages, no figures, plain LaTeX fil

Solving Gauge Invariant Systems without Gauge Fixing: the Physical Projector in 0+1 Dimensional Theories

The projector onto gauge invariant physical states was recently constructed for arbitrary constrained systems. This approach, which does not require gauge fixing nor any additional degrees of freedom beyond the original ones---two characteristic features of all other available methods for quantising constrained dynamics---is put to work in the context of a general class of quantum mechanical gauge invariant systems. The cases of SO(2) and SO(3) gauge groups are considered specifically, and a comprehensive understanding of the corresponding physical spectra is achieved in a straightforward manner, using only standard methods of coherent states and group theory which are directly amenable to generalisation to other Lie algebras. Results extend by far the few examples available in the literature from much more subtle and delicate analyses implying gauge fixing and the characterization of modular space.Comment: 32 pages, LaTeX fil

Topological Background Fields as Quantum Degrees of Freedom of Compactified Strings

It is shown that background fields of a topological character usually introduced as such in compactified string theories correspond to quantum degrees of freedom which parametrise the freedom in choosing a representation of the zero mode quantum algebra in the presence of non-trivial topology. One consequence would appear to be that the values of such quantum degrees of freedom, in other words of the associated topological background fields, cannot be determined by the nonperturbative string dynamics.Comment: 1+10 pages, no figure

Noncommuting Coordinates and Magnetic Monopoles

The appearance of noncommuting spatial coordinates is studied in quantum systems containing a magnetic monopole and under the influence of a radial potential. We derive expressions for the commutators of the coordinates that have been restricted to the lowest energy level. Quantum corrections are found to previous results by Frenkel and Pereira based on quantizing the Dirac brackets of the classical theory. For two different potentials, the modified harmonic oscillator potential and the modified Coulomb potential, we also calculate the commutators for a projection to a fixed energy level.Comment: 8 pages, Late

Noncommutative Spherically Symmetric Spaces

We examine some noncommutative spherically symmetric spaces in three space dimensions. A generalization of Snyder's noncommutative (Euclidean) space allows the inclusion of the generator of dilations into the defining algebra of the coordinate and rotation operators. We then construct a spherically symmetric noncommutative Laplacian on this space having the correct limiting spectrum. This is presented via a creation and annihilation operator realization of the algebra, which may lend itself to a truncation of the Hilbert space.Comment: 9 pages, revtex, matches Phys.Rev.D versio