Related papers: What is a photon?
This paper explores the distinction between virtual and real photons in the context of the Davies quantum relativistic extension of the Wheeler-Feynman classical electromagnetic theory. An alternative way of understanding this distinction…
I discuss the use of light as a collection of real and virtual photons to study lingering questions in particle and nuclear physics.
A short overview of basics aspects of hadronic interaction of the photon is presented.
Photons are almost involved in each field of science and daily life of everyone. However, there are still some fundamental and puzzling questions such as what a photon is.The expressions of electromagnetic fields of a photon are here…
Photons deliver their energy and momentum to a point on a material target. It is commonplace to attribute this to particle impact. But since the inflight photon also has a wave nature, we are stuck with the paradox of wave and particle…
In near-field optics and optical tunneling theory, photon wave mechanics, i.e., the first quantized theory of the photon, allows us to address the spatial field localization problem in a flexible manner which links smoothly to classical…
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…
Standard pedagogy introduces optics as though it were a consequence of Maxwell's equations, and only grudgingly admits, usually in a rushed aside, that light has a particulate character that can somehow be reconciled with the wave picture.…
The two opposite concepts - multiphoton and effective photon - readily describing the photoelectric effect under strong irradiation in the case that the energy of the incident light is essentially smaller than the ionisation potential of…
Following the spirit of de Broglie and Einstein, we think the concepts of matter and radiation can be unified. We know a particle propagates like a wave; its motion is described by certain wave equations. At this point, it is not clear what…
We construct a class of Hamiltonians that describe the photodetection process from beginning to end. Our Hamiltonians describe the creation of a photon, how the photon travels to an absorber (such as a molecule), how the molecule absorbs…
Two-photon absorption is theoretically analyzed within the semiclassical formalism of radiation-matter interaction. We consider an ensemble of inhomogeneously broadened three-level atoms subjected to the action of two counterpropagating…
The phenomenon of the electromagnetic absorption by arbitrarily distributed discrete absorbers is analyzed from the photon point of view. It is shown that apart from the decrease in the intensity of the signal the net effect of absorption…
In this invited talk at the ``historical'' session of PHOTON2005, I was asked to recount the history and the development, from its earliest days to the present, of the idea of photon colliders based on conversion of high energy electrons to…
Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
We demonstrate that the transition photon radiation and pair creation can be interpreted as a diffractive phenomenon in terms of the light-cone wave functions in a way similar to the Good-Walker approach [6] to the diffraction dissociation.…
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…
James Clerk Maxwell unknowingly discovered a correct relativistic, quantum theory for the light quantum, forty-three years before Einstein postulated the photon's existence. In this theory, the usual Maxwell field is the quantum wave…
Quantum theory of photons based on the first quantization technique, similar to that used by Schroedinger in the formulation of quantum mechanics, is considered. First, scalar quantum mechanics of photons operating with the photon wave…
The photon is modeled as a monochromatic solution of Maxwell's equations confined as a soliton wave by the principle of causality of special relativity. The soliton travels rectilinearly at the speed of light. The solution can represent any…