One of the drivers for this seminar series is to get a glimpse of the many research questions, ideas, and results linked to the activities in our division. The seminars are intended to be very informal and we make plenty of room for questions and discussions.
Speaker: Maike Fahrenson, Chalmers
Title of the lecture: “Inertial Repulsion from Quantum Geometry”
Overview
- Date:Starts 6 February 2026, 13:15Ends 6 February 2026, 14:15
- Location:Von Bahr, Soliden
- Language:English
Abstract:
Inertial effects arise in non-inertial frames of reference due to acceleration and rotation and extend naturally to quantum mechanical systems [1]. We focus on the effect of the centrifugal force on a Dirac particle in a rotating frame and show that its connection to quantum geometry induces a repulsive effective force. As the centrifugal force is odd under spatial inversion, it couples linearly to the position operator of the Dirac particle, similarly to the electric dipole interaction. In momentum space, this coupling shows up as a derivative, which can be promoted to a covariant derivative under a local U(1) geometric gauge transformation associated with the Berry phase. In the context of the dipole coupling to the centrifugal force, we treat the Berry curvature as a dynamical degree of freedom of the theory that, upon integration, can mediate effective forces and leads to a dipole-like repulsive effective interaction, emerging from the quantum geometry [2].
[1] Maike Fahrensohn and R. Matthias Geilhufe. Inertial Repulsion from Quan-
tum Geometry. 2025. arXiv: 2511.03510
[2] Friedrich W Hehl and Wei-Tou Ni. “Inertial effects of a Dirac particle”. In:
Physical Review D 42.6 (1990), p. 2045.
Contact
- Professor, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics, Physics