the Doppler effect (relativistic)

Chris­t­ian Doppler in 1942 pre­dicted the Doppler effect for all kinds of waves, not only sound waves. The Doppler effect for light was demon­strated in 1948 by Fizeau. In con­junc­tion with the arti­cle on the clas­si­cal Doppler effect, as it occurs e.g. for sound waves, we will here exam­ine the rel­a­tivis­tic Doppler effect which is respon­si­ble for fre­quency shifts in elec­tro­mag­netic waves such as light.

Einstein’s spe­cial rel­a­tiv­ity the­ory pos­tu­lates that, as long as we are deal­ing with uni­form motion, there is no frame of ref­er­ence prefer­able over another. Also, all the laws of physics (and thus elec­tro­mag­net­ism) must be valid irre­spec­tive of the cho­sen ref­er­ence frame. One imme­di­ate con­clu­sion then must be that we need not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between a mov­ing source (with sta­tion­ary receiver) and a mov­ing receiver (with sta­tion­ary source) as in the clas­si­cal case with a medium.

Again, we start with the plane wave, rep­re­sented by its pha­sor $A(t)$, as in the clas­si­cal case.

$$A(\mathbf{r},t)=A_{0}\exp\bigl(i\omega t-i\mathbf{k}\cdot\mathbf{r}\bigr) \label{plane-wave}$$

where $A_0$ describes the (con­stant) ampli­tude and phase of the emit­ted sig­nal, $\omega$ is its fre­quency at the source and $\mathbf{k}$ is the wave vec­tor, describ­ing the spa­tial fre­quency of the wave and its direc­tion.

In the ref­er­ence frame of the source, a mov­ing receiver can be described sim­i­larly to the clas­si­cal case, with the wave field at the loca­tion of the receiver mov­ing with veloc­ity $\mathbf{v}$ (in the source frame of ref­er­ence) given by

$$A(\mathbf{r},t)=A_{0}\exp\Bigl[i\omega t-i\mathbf{k}\cdot\bigl(\mathbf{r}_{0}+\mathbf{v} t\bigr)\Bigr] \label{field-R}$$

In the clas­si­cal case, the received fre­quency was deter­mined by dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of the phase of the field with respect to time,

$$\begin{aligned}
\omega^\prime_{R} &= \partial_t \arg\bigl[A(\mathbf{r},t)\bigr] \vphantom{\biggl(\biggr)}\\
& =\omega-\mathbf{k}\cdot\mathbf{v}\\
& =\omega\biggl(1-\frac{\mathbf{\hat{k}}\cdot\mathbf{v}}{c}\biggr)
\end{aligned}\label{phase-differentiation}$$

In rel­a­tivis­tic physics, how­ever, in order to obtain the fre­quency observed by the receiver we have to do the phase dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion in the ref­er­ence frame of the receiver. Ein­stein pos­tu­lated that we need to apply the Lorentz trans­for­ma­tion to con­vert the mea­sure­ments of time and space in a ref­er­ence frame which is defined to be at rest (source) into the mea­sure­ments of the same quan­ti­ties that would be obtained in another ref­er­ence frame (receiver) which is mov­ing with veloc­ity $\mathbf{v}$ rel­a­tive to the frame at rest. The Lorentz trans­forms for time and space are

$$\begin{gathered}
t^\prime = \gamma \biggl(t - \frac{\mathbf{v}\cdot \mathbf{r}}{c^2} \biggr)\\
\mathbf{r}^\prime = \mathbf{r} + \mathbf{v} \bigl(\gamma - 1 \bigr) \frac{\mathbf{\hat{v}} \cdot \mathbf{r}}{\mathbf{v} \cdot \mathbf{v}} - \gamma \, \mathbf{v} \, t
\end{gathered}\label{Lorentz-transformation}$$

where the primed vari­ables denote the quan­ti­ties in the mov­ing ref­er­ence frame and

$$\gamma = \biggl(1 - \frac{\mathbf{v}\cdot\mathbf{v}}{c^2}\biggr)^{-\frac{1}{2}}$$

is the Lorentz fac­tor. The inverse trans­forms are

$$\begin{gathered}
t = \gamma \biggl(t^\prime + \frac{\mathbf{v}\cdot \mathbf{r}^\prime}{c^2} \biggr)\\
\mathbf{r} = \mathbf{r}^\prime + \mathbf{v} \bigl(\gamma - 1 \bigr) \frac{\mathbf{\hat{v}} \cdot \mathbf{r}^\prime}{\mathbf{v} \cdot \mathbf{v}} + \gamma \, \mathbf{v} \, t^\prime
\end{gathered}\label{inverse-Lorentz-transformation}$$

The dif­fer­ence in the for­ward and inverse trans­forms is merely in the sign of $\mathbf{v}$ in agree­ment with the pos­tu­lated equiv­a­lence of all ref­er­ence frames. It is equally valid to define the receiver ref­er­ence frame to be at rest with the source frame mov­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion $-\mathbf{v}$ (assum­ing the coor­di­nate sys­tems in both cases to have the same ori­en­ta­tion). Hence the inverse trans­form can only dif­fer in the sign of the veloc­ity vec­tor.

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