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The Field Structure of Free Photons

Quantum Physics 2023-01-30 v1 Optics

Abstract

Using a quantum field theoretic description of the photon it is shown that, as intuitively expected but not before theoretically proven, the vector potential of a photon has a likely amplitude associated with a discrete frequency and therefore energy, and momentum. In particular, by finding the wave-functional for the vector potential, it is shown that the likely absolute amplitude spectrum has delta function at a given frequency. This analysis is extended to n-photon systems. It shows that such systems have a vector potential distribution whose most likely element has a strong sinusoidal component which has an amplitude corresponding to n-fold more energy than a single photon system. An analogous result for photons of different energy is also derived. Through the use of Parseval's theorem for stochastic systems, the calculations and associated analyses introduces a simple tool for exploring the nature of QFT Schrodinger wave-functional generally.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.11434,
  title  = {The Field Structure of Free Photons},
  author = {Anthony Rizzi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.11434},
  year   = {2023}
}

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13 pages