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research article

The spinorial ball: A macroscopic object of spin-1/2

Bernard-Bernardet, Samuel
•
Dumas, Emily
•
Apffel, Benjamin  
February 1, 2025
American Journal Of Physics

In quantum physics lectures, half-integer spins are generally introduced as "objects that do not come back to their original state after one full turn but that do after two." As a consequence, students often consider this behavior to be purely quantum mechanical. However, spin-1/2 is above all a geometrical property of the rotations group and can, therefore, also have practical consequences at the macroscopic scale. To illustrate this, we introduce and describe in this work a new pedagogical tool named the spinorial ball. It allows students to concretely manipulate a macroscopic 1/2-spin, which helps them to build intuition as to how the latter behaves under rotations. This object can also be used to introduce several general concepts from the theory of Lie groups, such as group homomorphism and homotopy classes of loops through the example of the groups SU(2) and SO(3). The spinorial ball provides a macroscopic visualization of all these concepts, which are ubiquitous in quantum physics.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1119/5.0160770
Web of Science ID

WOS:001407552900006

Author(s)
Bernard-Bernardet, Samuel

DotWave Lab

Dumas, Emily

University of Illinois System

Apffel, Benjamin  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-02-01

Publisher

AIP Publishing

Published in
American Journal Of Physics
Volume

93

Issue

2

Start page

164

End page

171

Subjects

2 COUPLED PENDULA

•

ONE-HALF SPIN

•

Social Sciences

•

Science & Technology

•

Physical Sciences

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LWE  
Available on Infoscience
February 6, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/246563
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