Anisotropic polarization, predicted as a result of the diffraction of blackbody radiation at a reflective phase grating with ideal conductivity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that blackbody radiation interacting with an ideal conductive diffraction grating can develop anisotropic polarization, challenging assumptions of microstate probability uniformity and indicating nonergodic behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical model showing how diffraction can induce polarization anisotropy and entropy decrease in blackbody radiation, revealing nonergodic effects.

Findings

Anisotropic polarization arises during diffraction.

Entropy decreases due to nonergodic photon trajectories.

Deviation from microcanonical distribution observed.

Abstract

In the course of analyzing the axiomatic principles that form the basis of statistical physics, the validity of the postulate that all the isoenergetic microstates of a closed system are equally probable was checked. This article reports the results of numerically modelling the interaction of thermodynamically equilibrium blackbody radiation with a reflective phase diffraction grating that possesses ideal conductivity. Cases are found in which anisotropy of the polarization parameters is guaranteed to appear inside a closed volume of initially homogeneous blackbody radiation, resulting in a formal decrease of its Boltzmann entropy as a consequence of deviation from the microcanonical Gibbs distribution. This is apparently caused by the discontinuous character of the change of the phase trajectories of the photons during diffraction, which makes the physical system under consideration nonergodic.