Lewis and Berry phases for a gravitational wave interacting with a quantum harmonic oscillator

TL;DR

This paper explores the quantum phase effects, specifically Lewis and Berry phases, arising from a gravitational wave interacting with a quantum harmonic oscillator, providing explicit formulas for different wave polarizations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute Lewis and Berry phases for a quantum harmonic oscillator influenced by gravitational waves, considering general polarization states and simplifying assumptions.

Findings

Derived explicit expressions for Berry phase under various conditions.

Established a framework to analyze quantum phases in gravitational wave interactions.

Separated the Hamiltonian to facilitate phase calculations.

Abstract

In this work, we consider a gravitational wave interacting with a quantum harmonic oscillator in the transverse-traceless gauge. We take the gravitational wave to be carrying the signatures of both plus and cross polarization at first. We then try to obtain a suitable form of the Lewis invariant using the most general form possible while considering only quadratic order contributions from both position and momentum variables. In order to progress further, we then drop the cross terms obtaining a separable Hamiltonian in terms of the first and the second spatial coordinates. We then obtain two Lewis invariants corresponding to each separable parts of the entire Hamiltonian of the system. Using both Lewis invariants, one can obtain two Ermakov-Pinney equations, from which we finally obtain the corresponding Lewis phase and eventually the Berry phase for the entire system. Finally, we obtain some explicit expressions of the Berry phase for a plane polarized gravitational wave with different choices of the harmonic oscillator frequency.