English

The geometrical interpretation of the photon position operator

Quantum Physics 2021-10-13 v4

Abstract

It is shown that the photon position operator X^\hat{\vec{X}} with commuting components can be written in the momentum representation as X^=iD^\hat{\vec{X}}=i \hat{\vec{D}}, where D^\hat{\vec{D}} is a flat connection in the tangent bundle T(R3{(0,0,k3)R3:k30})T(\mathbb{R}^3 \setminus \{ (0,0,k_3) \in \mathbb{R}^3 : k_3 \geq 0\}) over R3{(0,0,k3)R3:k30}\mathbb{R}^3 \setminus \{ (0,0,k_3) \in \mathbb{R}^3 : k_3 \geq 0\} equipped with the Cartesian structure. Moreover, D^\hat{\vec{D}} is such that the tangent 22-planes orthogonal to the momentum are parallelly propagated with respect to D^\hat{\vec{D}} and, also, D^\hat{\vec{D}} is an anti-Hermitian operator with respect to the scalar product ΨH^2sΦ\langle \mathbf{\Psi} | \hat{H}^{-2s} |\mathbf{\Phi} \rangle. The eigenfunctions ΨX(x)\mathbf{\Psi}_{\vec{X}} (\vec{x}) of the position operator X^\hat{\vec{X}} are found.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.04351,
  title  = {The geometrical interpretation of the photon position operator},
  author = {Michal Dobrski and Maciej Przanowski and Jaromir Tosiek and Francisco J. Turrubiates},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.04351},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

23 pages, 1 figure, corrected typos