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Published on: March 18, 2019
Linking emergent phenomena and broken symmetries through one-dimensional objects and their dot/cross products
Sang-Wook Cheong1, Fei-Ting Huang1, Minhyong Kim2,3
1Rutgers Center for Emergent Materials and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, 136 Frelinghuysen Rd, Piscataway, NJ, United States of America.
Abstract:
The symmetry of the whole experimental setups, including specific sample environments and measurables, can be compared with that of specimens for observable physical phenomena. We, first, focus on one-dimensional (1D) experimental setups, independent from any spatial rotation around one direction, and show that eight kinds of 1D objects (four; vector-like, the other four; director-like), defined in terms of symmetry, and their dot and cross products are an effective way for the symmetry consideration. The dot products form a Z2× Z2× Z2group with Abelian additive operation, and the cross products form a Z2× Z2group with Abelian additive operation or Q8, a non-Abelian group of order eight, depending on their signs. Those 1D objects are associated with characteristic physical phenomena. When a 3D specimen has symmetry operational similarity (SOS) with (identical or lower, but not higher, symmetries than) an 1D object with a particular phenomenon, the 3D specimen can exhibit the phenomenon. This SOS approach can be a transformative and unconventional avenue for symmetry-guided materials designs and discoveries.
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Dot Product
In engineering, the dot product of any two vectors is the product of the magnitudes of the vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. It is denoted by a dot symbol between the two vectors.
Consider a vehicle pulling an object along the ground using a rope. If the rope makes an angle with the horizontal axis, the work done can be calculated using the dot product of the force applied and the object's displacement.
The dot...

