Related papers: Who has seen a free photon?
A one-hundred-year old controversy, the Abraham-Minkowski controversy, concerns two widely disparate predictions for the momentum of light in glass. In the Abraham case the photon momentum is inversely proportional to the index of…
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…
The past decades have seen substantial interest in the so-called orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, driven largely by its diverse range of applications. However, there are fundamental theoretical issues with decomposing the angular…
Exact stationary solutions of the wave equation are obtained to describe the interaction between magnetic moment of elementary particle and circularly polarized photons. The obtained solutions substantially modify the conventional model of…
We exploit the fact that, in Minkowski space-time, gamma matrices are possibly more fundamental than the metric to describe how gauge invariance at perturbative level enforces a Lagrangian for spinor electrodynamics with massless photons.…
In the standard model of particle physics, photons are mass-less particles with a particular dispersion relation. Tests of this claim at different scales are both interesting and important. Experiments in territory labs and several…
Einstein's photo-electric effect allows us to regard electromagnetic waves as massless particles. Then, how is the photon helicity translated into the electric and magnetic fields perpendicular to the direction of propagation? This is an…
The free electromagnetic field, solution of Maxwell's equations and carrier of energy, momentum and spin, is construed as an emergent collective property of an ensemble of photons, and with this, the consistency of an interpretation that…
Classically, electromagnetic pulses are described by real fields that couple to charged matter and propagate causally. We will show here that real fields of the form used in standard classical electromagnetic theory have a quantum…
In order to get some insight in the intricacies of the Abraham-Minkowski energy-momentum problem in phenomenological electrodynamics, we briefly analyze eight different experimental situations in radiation optics. Six of the experiments are…
A momentum of the photon in a surface plasmon could be hundreds and even thousand times higher as compared to a momentum of a photon in a free space. Such a photon could be scattered on an electron the later being supplied by a notable…
It had been a long standing problem that there is no consistent definition of photon position operator nor photon number density in the context of quantum theory. In this paper we derive the photon detection operator, which defines location…
The polarization operator in a constant and homogeneous magnetic field of arbitrary strength is investigated on mass shell. The calculations are carried out at all photon energies higher the pair creation threshold as well as lower this…
We show that the use of momentum-space optical interferometry, which avoids any spatial overlap between two parts of a macroscopic quantum state, presents a unique way to study coherence phenomena in polariton condensates. In this way, we…
The gravitational deflection of massless and massive particles, both with and without spin, has been extensively studied. This paper discusses the lensing of a particle which oscillates between two interaction eigenstates. The deflection…
A field state containing photons propagating in different directions has a non vanishing mass which is a quantum observable. We interpret the shift of this mass under transformations to accelerated frames as defining space-time observables…
It is shown that a Dirac(-type) equation for a rank-two bi-spinor field on Minkowski (configuration) spacetime furnishes a Lorentz-covariant quantum-mechanical wave equation in position-space representation for a single free photon. This…
We present a theoretical framework that describes a wave packet of light prepared in a state of definite photon number interacting with an arbitrary quantum system (e.g. a quantum harmonic oscillator or a multi-level atom). Within this…
We consider the nonunitary quantum dynamics of neutral massless scalar particles used to model photons around a massive gravitational lens. The gravitational interaction between the lensing mass and asymptotically free particles is…
Spin is a fundamental degree of freedom, whose existence was proven by Dirac for an electron by imposing the relativity to quantum mechanics, leading to the triumph to derive the Dirac equation. Spin of a photon should be linked to…