Dirac Particles in Twisted Tubes

Abstract

We consider the dynamics of a relativistic Dirac particle constrained to move in the interior of a twisted tube by confining boundary conditions, in the approximation that the curvature of the tube is small and slowly varying. In contrast with the nonrelativistic theory, which predicts that a particle's spin does not change as the particle propagates along the tube, we find that the angular momentum eigenstates of a relativistic spin-1/2 particle may behave nontrivially. For example, a particle with its angular momentum initially polarized in the direction of propagation may acquire a nonzero component of angular momentum in the opposite direction on turning through 2 πradians. Also, the usual nonrelativistic effective potential acquires an additional factor in the relativistic theory.

16 pages, 3 EPS figures, REVTeX using BoxedEPS package; email to [email protected]

References in corpus (2)

• Bound States and Threshold Resonances in Quantum Wires with Circular Bends
• Quantum Mechanical Embedding of Spinning Particle and Induced Spin-connection

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