Rigid Particle and its Spin Revisited

Makito Oi

Nuclear rotation is revisited to seek for a new perspective.Review is made first for the basic concept of the nuclear rotation.Then, the quantization procedure of the rigid-body Hamiltonian is reviewed for a quantum mechanical understanding of the dynamics of rigid-body rotations.A linear rigid body is then investigated and its motion is studied from classical and quantum viewpoints.Finally, an application of the linear rigid-body rotation is attempted for a description of elongated nuclear systems, such as Beryllium 8, a two-alpha-cluster system.

Siegfried Flügge

M. Rivas

Prabir Kumar Mukherjee

Richard L. Liboff

The correspondence principle addresses the connection between classical and quantum physics. The simple statement that quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics in the limit where the principal quantum number n approaches infinity, while found in many textbooks, is not true in general. In this article we will give special attention to the notion that the quantum frequency spectrum of a periodic system reduces to the classical spectrum in this limit. Two simple counter-examples—a particle in a cubical box, and a rigid rotator—will show us that the classical result is not always recovered in the limit of large quantum numbers.