Spin precession and correlations in references under active and passive rotations

• Grant number: 25/20707-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Elementary Particle Physics and Fields
• Principal Investigator: Donato Giorgio Torrieri
• Grantee: Augusto Facundes da Silva
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin (IFGW). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 23/13749-1 - Multidisciplinary data analysis in Big-data: from High Energy Physics to Astrophysics and Medical Sciences, AP.TEM

Abstract

Motivated by classical questions raised by Newton's bucket thought experiment and its implications for non-inertial systems, this work aims to extend the previous study (arXiv:2502.21298), which qualitatively discussed the equivalence between rotating frames in quantum theory. We start from the distinction between active rotations (generated by the system's Hamiltonian) and passive rotations (arising from the rotation of the reference frame), where the equivalence between these approaches depends on the symmetry of the rotational potential and on the commutation properties of the rotation group generators. The present work proposes to introduce a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of density matrices associated with each type of rotation in spin space, whose implications may be relevant for the phenomenology of the quark-gluon plasma and for the interpretation of quantum states in rotating reference frames in general.