Fictitious forces and simulated magnetic fields in rotating reference frames

We show that the Wigner-Bargmann program of grounding nonrelativistic quantum mechanics in the unitary projective representations of the Galilei group can be extended to include all noninertial reference frames. The key concept is the Galilean line group, the group of transformations that ties together all accelerating reference frames, and its representations. These representations are constructed under the natural constraint that they reduce to the well-known unitary, projective representations of the Galilei group when the transformations are restricted to inertial reference frames. This constraint can be accommodated only for a class of representations with a sufficiently rich cocycle structure. Unlike the projective representations of the Galilei group, these cocycle representations of the Galilean line group do not correspond to central extensions of the group. Rather, they correspond to a class of nonassociative extensions, known as loop prolongations, that are determined by three-cocycles. As an application, we show that the phase shifts due to the rotation of Earth that have been observed in neutron interferometry experiments and the rotational effects that lead to simulated magnetic fields in optical lattices can be rigorously derived from the representations of the loop prolongations of the Galilean line group.