# All Questions

852 views

### Theoretical treatment of Hydrogen bond?

I would like to understand how the Hydrogen bond can be described through the Schroedinger equation. I don't need numerical methods that one uses them to simulate it, rather I need its treatment from ...
283 views

### Time for a wind-battred door to slam

Foolishly leaving the window too widely open, earlier today my bathroom door slammed shut with the wind. How could I theoretically work out the time it takes to close? Would it be impossible to ...
396 views

### Speed of light and virtual particles

After becoming extremely bored while studying for an Afrikaans exam, I started thinking about virtual particles. So, can light (photons) interact with virtual particles (even though they only exist ...
273 views

### Solar Thermal/Solar Photo-voltaic calculations [closed]

This is my final high school assignment. I'm asked to prepare a research document on Solar Thermal and Solar Photo-voltaic, to prove that these two are feasible alternative power sources to power the ...
1k views

### Does the magnitude of pressure on the sides (not the top and bottom) of a volume depend on depth?

I understand that at a point in a fluid, such as water, the fluid will be in equilibrium as the sum of the pressure from all directions will equal to zero. For a volume of water, the reasoning should ...
813 views

### Energy-time uncertainty and pair creation

Usually, the energy-time analogue of the position-momentum uncertainty relation is quoted as $\Delta E \Delta t \geq \frac{h}{4 \pi}$. This has interpretational issues and such. But, with a suitable ...
15k views

### Why does a tire need to be filled with air?

The Mini 4WD's tires aren't full of air, and it can run. Also, the tank doesn't have tires with air. So, the question is: why do real cars on the road need to be filled with air? What is the idea ...
1k views

### James Webb Space Telescope's halo orbit at Lagrange point L2

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to be launched in 2018 and operate in the L2 vicinity, about 1.5 million km from Earth. It will be placed in a halo orbit around the unstable L2 ...
2k views

### Maximum Kinetic energy of a spring

The block in the figure below lies on a horizontal frictionless surface and is attached to the free end of the spring, with a spring constant of 35 N/m. Initially, the spring is at its relaxed ...
508 views

### Solving a system of PDE equation in mathematica using a steady-state and time-evolution method [closed]

I'm working to solve the steady-state short circuit current of a solar cells, using the coupled continuity equations with a drift-diffusion expression and Poisson's equation: ...
194 views

### Bandgap Spacing in Photonic Crystals

I am doing some self-study on photonics and have encountered the following question: We know that amorphous electronic crystals such as amorphous silicon have a bandgap. Can amorphous photonic ...
83 views

### materials that repel positrons?

In this article is discussed at some length positron formation in metallic surfaces. Positrons have work functions that describe how much energy they have to receive in order to be extracted from the ...
195 views

### When and How far out will the Voyager twins come to a full-stop?

So space is mostly, but not entirely, empty. Every few (dunno the order) cubic metres of space there is some cosmic dust. Assuming that Cosmic dust exerts some friction on passing bodies, The ...
216 views

### Faster than light due to reference position [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Travelling faster than the speed of light Please try to follow and clarify me I've been curious about this for a long time as it seems a bit paradox due to the rule that ...
744 views

### When and how do you represent a two body state as a tensor product?

I have read that in quantum mechanics, compound systems are constructed as tensor products. But on page 177 of Griffith, for example, a two body wavefunction is introduced as Psi ...
3k views

### Quantum phyics project for a high schooler [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Study Quantum Physics I am a high schooler who is interested in physics and mathematics, and I have a kind of 'high-school thesis' coming up in a year and a half or so. ...
96k views

### Why do we use Root Mean Square (RMS) values when talking about AC voltage

What makes it a good idea to use RMS rather than peak values of current and voltage when we talk about or compute with AC signals.
570 views

### Why possibility for X-ray to excite inner electrons higher than outer electrons?

It seems X-ray absorption spectroscopy is usually ascribed to the interation between photons and inner electrons. Does it mean inner electrons are much preferred by X-ray photons to outer electrons? ...
77k views

### Why do birds, sitting on electric wires, not get shocked?

If we would touch electric wires, we would get a shock, even if we are not touching ground (so that no connection is complete form wire to ground through us). I always see that birds sit on electric ...
538 views

### Is the Schwarzschild black hole unphysical?

To obtain the Schwarzschild metric from Einstein equations of general relativity, we suppose that the energy density is a distribution : $$\rho (\vec{r}) = M \delta(\vec{r})$$ The Schwarzschild ...
5k views

### Is there a symmetry associated to the conservation of information?

Conservation of information seems to be a deep physical principle. For instance, Unitarity is a key concept in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory. We may wonder if there is an underlying ...
330 views

### two electron spins line up in opposite direction and the Ising model

What cofuses me with the Ising Model is the claim that these nearby little magnets want to face the same direction. facing the same direction, they have lower energy. This seems to conflict with the ...
110 views

### Is synchrotron radiation considered incandescent?

Synchrotron radiation is produced via the acceleration of charged particles, much like incandescence. However, all information I've seen state that incandescent light is produced exclusively from the ...
714 views

### Path integral and geometric quantization

I was wondering how one obtains geometric quantization from a path integral. It's often assumed that something like this is possible, for example, when working with Chern-Simons theory, but rarely ...
2k views

### Do atoms have lifespans?

From A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: Atoms, however, go on practically forever. Nobody actually knows how long an atom can survive, but according to Martin Rees it is ...
2k views

### Linear motion with variable acceleration

Consider the following problem I pull a mass m resting at x = 0 on a frictionless table connected to a spring with some k by an amount A and let it go. What will be its speed at x=0? I know how to ...
243 views

### Is there a quantum state for a large system

My understanding of quantum mechanics is that the state of a system is represented by a vector in multidimensional complex vector space. Is there, in principal, a state vector that represents a large, ...
575 views

### Can auxiliary fields be thought of as Lagrange multipliers?

In the BRST formalism of gauge theories, the Lautrup-Nakanishi field $B^a(x)$ appears as an auxiliary variable \mathcal{L}_\text{BRST}=-\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu\nu}^a F^{a\,\mu\nu}+\frac{1}{2}\xi B^a B^a + ...
409 views

### Will the plates of a parallel plates capacitor keep its charge after being charged then seperated from the non- conductor?

If i had 3 plates 2 metals and 1 glass .I put them together to form a basic parallel plates capacitor. After charging it and approaching it to an electroscope nothing happened that's because ...
1k views

### Is flying really easier on smaller scales?

In the book Playing with Planets, the author makes the following argument, pertinent to flying robots of the future: As it is, an important law of physics says that smaller organisms fly much more ...
776 views

### Find magnetic scalar potential for superconducting sphere

In regions where $J = 0$, the curl of the magnetic field $B$ is necessarily zero (since $\nabla \times B = \mu_0 J$). Therefore $B$ can be written as $B = -\nabla V_m$, where $V_m$ is a scalar ...
135 views

### Wave function of IQH and FQH electrons

What are the wave functions of the ground state of Integer Quantum Hall (IQH) and Fractional Quantum Hall (FQH) electrons?
513 views

### Causal and Global structure of Penrose Diagrams

What kind of global and causal structures does a Penrose diagram reveal? How do I see (using a Penrose diagram) that two different spacetimes have a similar global and causal structure? Also, I ...
1k views

### Is it possible to travel at precisely the speed of sound?

I've been talking to a friend, and he said that it's impossible to travel at exactly the same speed as the speed of sound is. He argued that it's only possible to break through the sound barrier using ...
548 views

### Why we use $L_2$ Space In QM?

I asked this question for many people/professors without getting a sufficient answer, why in QM Lebesgue spaces of second degree are assumed to be the one that corresponds to the Hilbert vector space ...
683 views

### How is it possible to come to a conclusion that Universe is a result of the Big Bang while we aren't able to observe the entire Universe?

-I'm not a religious person so this is not a denial. I'm just trying to understand the most fundamental topic about Universe. -I know the Big Bang cosmological model is not a law but it's a theory. ...
214 views

### What the name of the evacuated glass gadget with black and white vanes that turn when a light is applied?

I remember a glass device my physics teacher had at high school which Contained some vanes mounted somehow on a vertical axis, which were all black on one side and white on the other Was in a ...
734 views

### Dropping an object on the moon [closed]

If you are dropping an object on the moon would it fall on to the moon's surface or fall towards earth?
85 views

### How is a qubit realized in a cavity?

Considering a single photon in a cavity, how is a qubit realized in this setup? How is the qubit $|0\rangle$ or $|1\rangle$ manipulated? I.e. how are the transitions $|0\rangle \to |1\rangle$ and ...
3k views

### Doppler cooling limit vs recoil limit

I was discussing laser cooling in class today and I understood that the main principle of the process is to tune a laser to a frequency lower than the absorbtion frequency of the atom and so only the ...
377 views

### How was the universe created?

I do not know much beyond high school Physics. Thus, I am asking this question from almost layman's perspective: What, as per the best of our existing knowledge and widely accepted among the ...
2k views

### What is the spin rotation operator for spin > 1/2?

For spin $\frac{1}{2}$, the spin rotation operator $R_\alpha(\textbf{n})=\exp(-i\frac{\alpha}{2}\vec{\sigma}\cdot\textbf{n})$ has a simple form: ...
322 views

### Simulating quantum network of harmonic oscillators

Let's say that I have a system of $n$ particles $p_1,\ldots,p_n\in\mathbb{R}^3$ (where $n$ here is on the order of 10,000). Furthermore, suppose we have a graph $G=(V,E)$ describing some network, ...
151 views

### Compactness of spacetime: experiment and math

It is common to find models built on a compact spacetime. In mathematics, compactness is a very nice property $-$ and lot of powerful results depend on it. But how safe is assuming compactness of ...
402 views

### Future space-based telescope array

Radio-telescopes (e.g. the Very Large Array (VLA)) can simulate one gigantic dish by using separate smaller dishes. Q: Could such an array of optical telescopes potentially see an exoplanet at say 20 ...
302 views

### What is the gravity at the center of the Earth? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Would you be weightless at the center of the Earth? Supposing there is a cavity at the center of the Earth, what is the gravity there? What will be its direction and ...
13k views

### Abiotic oil vs the traditional theory of oil deposit formation [closed]

I am curious to see what people think of the abiotic theory of oil deposit formation versus the traditional theory. I have long wondered how enough organic material became trapped underground to ...
71k views

### Why is light called an 'electromagnetic wave' if it's neither electric nor magnetic?

How can light be called electromagnetic if it doesn't appear to be electric nor magnetic? If I go out to the sunlight, magnets aren't affected (or don't seem to be). And there is no transfer of ...