Steven Wilcox

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

McDonald, Patrick

Second Advisor

Colladay, Donald

Keywords

Lorentz Violations, Nuclear Physics, Shell Model

Area of Concentration

Mathematics, Physics

Abstract

The invariance of physical laws with respect to Lorentz symmetry is one of the most well supported notions in all of physics. Nevertheless, as physicists search for clues for understanding the nature of gravity at quantum mechanical scales and for resolving unexplained phenomena such as the observed antisymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe, the violation of Lorentz covariance has become an increasingly attractive indicator for new discoveries and unconventional physics. The motivation for this search comes from theoretical predictions of leading theories beyond the standard model, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, as well as from the fact that most other known symmetries besides CPT and Lorentz symmetry are broken in some physical processes. To accommodate this search, a framework called the Standard Model Extension (SME) has been developed and extensively studied [Colladay and Kostelecký(1998)]. The Standard Model Extension includes all first order Lorentz violating couplings of Standard Model fields and has been shown to preserve many of the important features of the Standard Model. In this thesis, a first order non-relativistic expansion of the Lorentz violating perturbations given by the SME are applied to the single particle nuclear shell model, and the implications of these results are discussed.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

Download

Share

COinS