Related papers: Who has seen a free photon?
We study the motion of a test particle in a stationary, axially and reflection symmetric spacetime of a central compact object, as affected by interaction with a test radiation field of the same symmetries. Considering the radiation flux…
Well over a century after the discovery of the electron, we are still faced with serious conceptual issues regarding precisely what an electron is. Since the development of particle physics and the Standard Model, we have accumulated a…
In this paper, we have proposed the spinor wave equation of free and non-free photon. On this basis, we given the spin operators and spin wave functions of photon, and calculated the wave function of photon in vacuum and medium. In…
Polarization is one of light's most versatile degrees of freedom for both classical and quantum applications. The ability to measure light's state of polarization and changes therein is thus essential; this is the science of polarimetry. It…
We address the problem of angular momentum decomposition of a free photon. We propose a natural and physical scheme for separating the total angular momentum operator for a free photon into an orbital part and a spin part with the hope that…
The direct detection of gravitational waves from binary mergers has been hailed as the discovery of the century. In the light of recent evidence on the existence of gravitational waves, it is now possible to know about the properties of…
Recent experimental progress in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics allows to study the regime of strong interaction between quantized light and complex matter systems. Due to the coherent coupling between photons and matter-degrees…
Photons strongly coupled to material systems constitute a novel system for studying the dynamics of non-equilibrium quantum many-body systems. We give a fully analytical description of the dynamics of photons coupled to a one-dimensional…
Electromagnetism is at the heart of the Standard Model, but despite all the successes of modern theory, our basic description of light traveling in free space remains unsatisfactory. The four bosons that compose light are introduced in a…
The claim some years ago, contrary to all textbooks, that the angular momentum of a photon (and gluon) can be split in a gauge-invariant way into an orbital and spin term, sparked a major controversy in the Particle Physics community. A…
The concept of a particle is ambiguous in quantum field theory. It is generally agreed that particles depend not only on spacetime, but also on coordinates used to parametrise spacetime points. One of us has in contrast proposed a…
Quantum theory stipulates that if two particles are identical in all physical aspects, the allowed states of the system are either symmetric or antisymmetric with respect to permutations of the particle labels. Experimentally, the symmetry…
Understanding of light-matter interaction is a keystone in mastering classical and quantum optics. This paper gives an overview of the fundamental principles used in these two fields for description of light-matter interaction. By exploring…
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) pointed out that the quantum-mechanical description of "physical reality" implied an unphysical, instantaneous action between distant measurements. To avoid such an action at a distance, EPR concluded that…
I will discuss some aspects of the concept of "point" in quantum gravity, using mainly the tool of noncommutative geometry. I will argue that at Planck's distances the very concept of point may lose its meaning. I will then show how, using…
In this paper we suggest a configuration of photons consistent with a spin $\hbar$, and a configuration of the fermions coherent with a spin $\hbar/2$. These suggested configurations open the way to further analyses which lead to the…
We use a relativistic argument to define an effective photon that travels through a transparent (non-absorbing) nondispersive dielectric medium of index of refraction $n$. If $p$ is the momentum of the photon in a vacuum, then the momentum…
These notes are more or less a faithful representation of my talk at the Workshop on ``Quantum Coding and Quantum Computing'' held at the University of Virginia. As such it is an introduction for non-physicists to the topics of the quantum…
The polarization operator of a photon in a constant and uniform magnetic field is studied taking into account the radiation width and shift of the Landau levels in both weak and strong fields compared with the critical field…
Minkowski space serves as a framework for the theoretical constructions that deal with manifestations of relativistic effects in physical phenomena. But neither Minkowski himself nor the subsequent developers of the relativity theory have…