N. Mukunda's Books

Classical Dynamics: A Modern Perspective

By: E C George Sudarshan,N Mukunda

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Classical Dynamics: A Modern Perspective

By: E C George Sudarshan,N Mukunda

Classical dynamics is traditionally treated as an early stage in the development of physics, a stage that has long been superseded by more ambitious theories. Here, in this book, classical dynamics is treated as a subject on its own as well as a research frontier. Incorporating insights gained over the past several decades, the essential principles of classical dynamics are presented, while demonstrating that a number of key results originally considered only in the context of quantum theory and particle physics, have their foundations in classical dynamics.Graduate students in physics and practicing physicists will welcome the present approach to classical dynamics that encompasses systems of particles, free and interacting fields, and coupled systems. Lie groups and Lie algebras are incorporated at a basic level and are used in describing space-time symmetry groups. There is an extensive discussion on constrained systems, Dirac brackets and their geometrical interpretation. The Lie-algebraic description of dynamical systems is discussed in detail, and Poisson brackets are developed as a realization of Lie brackets. Other topics include treatments of classical spin, elementary relativistic systems in the classical context, irreducible realizations of the Galileo and Poincaré groups, and hydrodynamics as a Galilean field theory. Students will also find that this approach that deals with problems of manifest covariance, the no-interaction theorem in Hamiltonian mechanics and the structure of action-at-a-distance theories provides all the essential preparatory groundwork for a passage to quantum field theory.This reprinting of the original text published in 1974 is a testimony to the vitality of the contents that has remained relevant over nearly half a century.

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Page Count

612

Publisher

World Scientific Publishing Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

9814713899

ISBN 13

9789814713894

Lectures on Advanced Mathematical Methods for Physicists

By: Sunil Mukhi,N. Mukunda

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Lectures on Advanced Mathematical Methods for Physicists

By: Sunil Mukhi,N. Mukunda

This book presents a survey of Topology and Differential Geometry and also, Lie Groups and Algebras, and their Representations. The first topic is indispensable to students of gravitation and related areas of modern physics, (including string theory) while the second has applications in gauge theory and particle physics, integrable systems and nuclear physics. Part I provides a simple introduction to basic topology, followed by a survey of homotopy. Calculus of differentiable manifolds is then developed, and a Riemannian metric is introduced along with the key concepts of connections and curvature. The final chapters lay out the basic notions of simplicial homology and De Rham cohomology as well as fibre bundles, particularly tangent and cotangent bundles. Part II starts with a review of group theory, followed by the basics of representation theory. A thorough description of Lie groups and algebras is presented with their structure constants and linear representations. Root systems and their classifications are detailed, and this section of the book concludes with the description of representations of simple Lie algebras, emphasizing spinor representations of orthogonal and pseudo-orthogonal groups. The style of presentation is succinct and precise. Involved mathematical proofs that are not of primary importance to physics student are omitted. The book aims to provide the reader access to a wide variety of sources in the current literature, in addition to being a textbook of advanced mathematical methods for physicists.

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