Related papers: Photon spin operator and Pauli matrix
Stokes parameters (${\bf S}$) in Poincar\'e sphere are very useful values to describe the polarisation state of photons. However, the fundamental principle of the nature of polarisation is not completely understood, yet, because we have no…
Motivated by a recent finding that Fresnel's phenomenological description of the optical activity in the chiral medium is not self-consistent, we conduct a thorough investigation into the nature of the polarization of a plane light wave. We…
It is shown that the two complex Cartesian components of the electric field of a monochromatic electromagnetic plane wave, with a temporal and spatial dependence of the form ${\rm e}^{{\rm i} (kz - \omega t)}$, form a SU(2) spinor that…
New degrees of freedom having the form of a unit vector are identified for characterizing the spin polarization of free electron. It is shown that when only the spin is considered, the non-commutativity of the Cartesian components of the…
The photon spin is an important resource for quantum information processing as is the electron spin in spintronics. However, for subwavelength confined optical excitations, polarization as a global property of a mode cannot be defined.…
It has been accepted that the polarization of the photon in vector beams is entangled with its momentum. Here a quantum description is advanced for the polarization that shows entanglement with the momentum. This is done by showing that the…
We present an operator approach to the description of photon polarization, based on Wigner's concept of elementary relativistic systems. The theory of unitary representations of the Poincare group, and of parity, are exploited to construct…
In the first order of the fine structer constant, the polarization operator of a photon is investigated in a constant and homogeneous magnetic field at arbitrary photon energies. For weak and strong fields H, compared with the Schwinger…
We extend a procedure for construction of the photon position operators with transverse eigenvectors and commuting components [Phys. Rev. A 59, 954 (1999)] to body rotations described by three Euler angles. The axial angle can be made a…
A classical circularly polarized electromagnetic wave carries angular momentum, and represents the classical limit of a photon, which carries quantized spin. It is shown that a very similar picture of a circularly polarized coherent wave…
We experimentally demonstrate the manipulation of two-orthogonal components of a spin wave in an atomic ensemble. Based on Raman two-photon transition and Larmor spin precession induced by magnetic field pulses, the coherent rotations…
In this paper we provide a consistent framework to address the notorious decomposition of the single-photon total angular momentum (TAM) into a spin (SAM) and an orbital (OAM) component. In particular, we find that the canonical SAM and…
Photons are elementary particles of lights, which have both spin and orbital angular momentum as internal degrees of freedom. Nature of spin is known as polarisation, which is widely used for sunglasses, liquid-crystal displays,…
Parallel transport of a vector around a closed curve on the surface of a sphere leads to a direction holonomy which can be related with a geometric phase that is equal to the solid angle subtended by the closed curve. Since Pancharatnam…
All elementary particles in nature can be classified as fermions with half-integer spin and bosons with integer spin. Within quantum electrodynamics (QED), even though the spin of the Dirac particle is well defined, there exist open…
In polarization optics unitary and non-unitary operations can be carried out by the Jones matrix. $\mathbf{Z}$ matrix is the $4\times 4$ analogue of the Jones matrix and the Mueller matrix of a nondepolarizing optical medium can be written…
The photon-induced process of electron-positron pair creation in a strong homogeneous magnetic field, provided that the polarization of particles is arbitrary, has been considered. The polarization of a photon is described in terms of the…
Light carries intrinsic spin angular momentum (SAM) when the electric or magnetic field vector rotates over time. A familiar vector equation calculates the direction of light's SAM density using the right hand rule with reference to the…
Under the spin-position decoupling approximation, a vector with a phase in 3D orientation space endowed with geometric algebra, substitutes the vector-matrix spin model built on the Pauli spin operator. The standard quantum operator-state…
The paper discusses the role played by Mueller and Jones formalisms in polarization optics, by addressing the following aspects: restriction to the SU(2) symmetry, non-relativistic Stokes 3-vectors; Cartan 2-spinors in polarization optics;…