1995 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

Wave Propagation in Random Media and Berry Phases

Research Project

Project/Area Number	06640524
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	物理学一般
Research Institution	KYOTO UNIVERSITY
Principal Investigator	KITANO Masao Kyoto Univ., Graduate School of Engineering, Associate Professor, 工学研究科, 助教授 (70115830)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	OGURA Hisanao Kyoto Univ., Graduate School of Engineering, Professor, 工学研究科, 教授 (50025954)
Project Period (FY)	1994 – 1995
Keywords	random media / wave propagation / Berry phase
Research Abstract	We investigated the geometrical features of 1D wave propagation, whose dynamics is described by the (2+1)-dimensional Lorentz group. There found many interesting geometrical ingredients such as spinor-like behavior of wave amplitudes, gauge transformations, Bloch-type equations, and Lorentz-group Berry phases. The geometrical descriptions were found to be very useful for intuitive understanding of 1D wave phenomena. The appearance of spinor-like behavior in classical context is very interesting in the sense that the two-valued representation was believed peculiar to the quantum regime. We also propose an optical experiment to verify these effects.