Charged spin particles in a homogenous magnetic field

Emile Durand

V. V. Dodonov, Alexandre V. Dodonov

Ian M Davies, Aubrey Truman

J. Jayaraman, Miguel A. Oliveira

Utilising the intimate connection of a charged particle in a homogeneous magnetic field to that of a harmonic oscillator, the authors demonstrate explicitly that the eigenvalue spectrum for the matrix operator S. pi for arbitrary spin in a uniform magnetic field in the z direction is governed, for its discrete part, by that of a Hermitian matrix defined on the space of the particle number and spin operators and is thus constrained to be real for any intensity of the external magnetic field. The present analysis generalises to arbitrary spin their previously reported results applied to the case of a spin-1 particle.

Stephen P. Martin

Vladimir A Bordovitsyn, A. N. Myagkii

A procedure based on the semiclassical approximation for high energy levels is developed to yield solutions to the classical equation of charge motion and to the Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi spin equation. To this end, exact solutions to the Klein-Gordon and the Dirac-Pauli equations are used. The essence of the procedure under review is that the quantum state of a charged particle in a homogeneous magnetic field is represented as a superposition of states corresponding to the neighboring energy levels. As a consequence, the expectation values of the momentum and spin operators with respect to the resulting nonstationary wave function (packet) strictly obey the classical equations of charge motion and spin precession.