arXiv subjects

Greg Egan

Publications and source records attributed to Greg Egan.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

Polar Orbits Around Binary Stars

Oks proposes the existence of a new class of stable planetary orbits around binary stars, in the shape of a helix on a conical surface whose axis of symmetry coincides with the interstellar axis. We show that this claim relies on the inappropriate use of an effective potential that is only applicable when the stars are held motionless, and that the existence of the torques required to maintain the proposed orbits would have been empirically detected in the motion of artificial satellites in high-inclination orbits.

math.DS↗

arXiv2002

Asymptotics of 10j symbols

The Riemannian 10j symbols are spin networks that assign an amplitude to each 4-simplex in the Barrett-Crane model of Riemannian quantum gravity. This amplitude is a function of the areas of the 10 faces of the 4-simplex, and Barrett and Williams have shown that one contribution to its asymptotics comes from the Regge action for all non-degenerate 4-simplices with the specified face areas. However, we show numerically that the dominant contribution comes from degenerate 4-simplices. As a consequence, one can compute the asymptotics of the Riemannian 10j symbols by evaluating a `degenerate spin network', where the rotation group SO(4) is replaced by the Euclidean group of isometries of R^3. We conjecture formulas for the asymptotics of a large class of Riemannian and Lorentzian spin networks in terms of these degenerate spin networks, and check these formulas in some special cases. Among other things, this conjecture implies that the Lorentzian 10j symbols are asymptotic to 1/16 times the Riemannian ones.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2002

An efficient algorithm for the Riemannian 10j symbols

The 10j symbol is a spin network that appears in the partition function for the Barrett-Crane model of Riemannian quantum gravity. Elementary methods of calculating the 10j symbol require order(j^9) or more operations and order(j^2) or more space, where j is the average spin. We present an algorithm that computes the 10j symbol using order(j^5) operations and order(j^2) space, and a variant that uses order(j^6) operations and a constant amount of space. An implementation has been made available on the web.

gr-qc↗