Abstract

In the course of analyzing the axiomatic principles that form the basis of statistical physics, the validity of the postulate that all the isoenergetic microstates of a closed system are equally probable was checked. This article reports the results of numerically modelling the interaction of thermodynamically equilibrium blackbody radiation with a reflective phase diffraction grating that possesses ideal conductivity. Cases are found in which anisotropy of the polarization parameters is guaranteed to appear inside a closed volume of initially homogeneous blackbody radiation, resulting in a formal decrease of its Boltzmann entropy as a consequence of deviation from the microcanonical Gibbs distribution. This is apparently caused by the discontinuous character of the change of the phase trajectories of the photons during diffraction, which makes the physical system under consideration nonergodic.

© 2012 OSA

Polarization imaging using an anisotropic diffraction grating and liquid crystal retarders

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