Circular birefringence of an atom in uniform rotation: The classical perspective

Abstract

Recent quantum analyses of the dynamics of a static field-free atom in uniform rotation have shown that the atom exhibits optical asymmetries in its interaction with left and right circularly polarized light that are strictly forbidden in an inertial reference frame. The chiral asymmetries derive from a rotationally induced splitting of inertially degenerate magnetic substates. A classical mechanical treatment of the problem given in this article shows that the same phenomena may be interpreted in terms of the differential influence of the Coriolis ‘‘pseudo’’ force on particle orbits of opposite sense. In addition to being the source of some unusual optical effects, the atom in uniform rotation is a system conceptually interesting for its inequivalent (a) kinetic and canonical dynamical variables, and (b) energy and Hamiltonian. The system is illustrative of the converse of Larmor’s theorem whereby a field-free rotating frame simulates the physics of an inertial frame with static magnetic field.