Larmor precession reexamined: Testable correction and its ramifications
Abstract
For a spin-polarized plane wave passing through a spin-rotator containing uniform magnetic field, we provide a detailed analysis for solving the appropriate Schr\"odinger equation. A modified expression for spin precession is obtained which reduces to the standard Larmor precession relation when kinetic energy is very large compared to the spin-magnetic field interaction. We show that there are experimentally verifiable regimes of departure from the standard Larmor precession formula. The treatment is then extended to the case of a spin-polarized wave packet passing through a uniform magnetic field. The results based on the standard expression for Larmor precession and that obtained from the modified formula are compared in various regimes of the experimental parameters.