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Phonons and Forces: Momentum versus Pseudomomentum in Moving Fluids

Michael Stone

cond-matarXiv:cond-mat/0012316

Abstract

I provide a pedagogical introduction to the notion of pseudomomentum for waves in a medium, and show how changes in pseudomomentum may sometimes be used to compute real forces. I then explain how these ideas apply to sound waves in a fluid. When the background fluid is in motion, the conservation laws for pseudomomentum and pseudoenergy are most easily obtained by exploiting the acoustic metric and the formalism of general relativity.

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