Dr. Shyamal Biswas and his group members (Bikram Keshari Behera and Surendra Kumar Gour) at the School of Physics of the University of Hyderabad wrote a research article on “refractive index for the mechanical refraction of a relativistic particle”. The article was recently published in European Physical Journal D 78, 60 (2024) and was subsequently highlighted on 24 June 2024 in the European Physical Journal News page at https://www.epj.org/epjd-news/2780-epjd-highlight-determining-refractive-index-at-relativistic-speeds.
Dr. Shyamal Biswas
The article is all about the law of mechanical refraction which is closely related to a high-school topic on optical refraction. The authors critically analyzed the importance of Descartes’ metaphysical theory and extended it for mechanical refraction. Their result for the mechanical refractive index exactly matches with the forms of both Fermat’s result on Snell’s law of optical refraction at the ultra-relativistic limit and Descartes’ metaphysical result on the pseudo-Snell law of optical refraction at the non-relativistic limit.
Historically, Descartes’ metaphysical theory for optical refraction was rejected by Fermat in the 17th century in connection with the `least time principle’ named after him. The theory of relativity was formulated much later in the early 20th century. Biswas and his co-workers established the brilliance of Descartes’ idea about the conservation of the tangential component of the velocity of a particle in the process of refraction. Descartes’ metaphysical theory, however, needed a relativistic correction which is now done by Biswas and his co-workers.
“A simple and lucid work within the scope of high-school mathematics can also get a media attraction if it has a historical flavor” concludes Dr. Shyamal Biswas.