Non-Inertial Frames and Dirac Observables in Relativity

Luca Lusanna is a retired research director of the Firenze section of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), of which he has been the President for five years. He is a fellow of the General Relativity and Gravitation Society, the Italian Physical Society, and Fellow and President of the General Relativity and Gravitation Italian Society. Since 2009, he has been the director of the Theoretical Topical Team of the ACES mission of ESA, tasked with putting an atomic clock on the International Space Station.

'The book is very much a technical monograph, with very detailed mathematical descriptions that will need careful study to make best use of it. It is not always an easy read, but rather a formidable tour-de-force that will primarily be for experts in the field.' Alan Heavens, The Observatory

• Preface; Part I. Special Relativity: Minkowski Space-time: 1. Galilei and Minkowski space-times; 2. Global non-inertial frames in special relativity; 3. Relativistic dynamics and the relativistic center of mass; 4. Matter in the rest-frame instant form of dynamics; Part II. General Relativity: Globally Hyperbolic Einstein Space-Times: 5. Hamiltonian gravity in Einstein space-times; 6. ADM tetrad gravity and its constraints; 7. Post-Minkowskian and post-Newtonian approximations; Part III. Dirac–Bergmann Theory of Constraints: 8. Singular Lagrangians and constraint theory; 9. Dirac observables invariant under the Hamiltonian gauge transformations generated by first-class constraints; 10. Concluding remarks and open problems; Appendix A. Canonical realizations of lie algebras, Poincare' group, Poincare' orbits and Wigner boosts; Appendix B. Grassmann variables and pseudo-classical Lagrangian; Appendix C. Relativistic perfect fluids and covariant relativistic thermo-dynamics; References; Index.