Related papers: Photon wave function
In modern physics courses the idea of photon has been teaching through from the einsteinian formulation based on the photoelectric effect. Einstein's photon concept allow the quantization of the electromagnetic field, but does not dwell on…
Based on the first-order perturbation theory, we show that the wave function of a photoelectron is a wave packet with the same width as the incident light pulse. Photoelectron detection measurements revealed that the widths of signal pulses…
The different light-cone wave functions of the photon up to twist four are defined. Some explicit expressions are extracted from results of Balitskii and al., Ali and Braun.
Schroedinger's wave function shows many aspects of a state of incomplete knowledge or information ("bit"): (1) it is usually defined on a space of classical configurations, (2) its generic entanglement is, therefore, analogous to…
In terms of a photon wave function corresponding to the (1, 0)+(0, 1) representation of the Lorentz group, the radiation and Coulomb fields within a source-free region can be described unitedly by a Lorentz-covariant Dirac-like equation. In…
Uncertainty relation for photons that overcomes the difficulties caused by the nonexistence of the photon position operator is derived in quantum electrodynamics. The photon energy density plays the role of the probability density in…
We outline how Bohmian mechanics works: how it deals with various issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics and how it is related to the usual quantum formalism. We then turn to some objections to Bohmian mechanics, for example the…
A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the meaning of quantum mechanics still remains elusive. This is largely due to the puzzling nature of the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. If we are realists about…
The ontological status of the quantum wavefunction remains one of the most debated questions in quantum theory. While epistemic interpretations regard the wavefunction as a reflection of our knowledge or beliefs, ontic interpretations treat…
Is the wave function a physical reality traveling through our apparatus? Is it a real wave, or it is only a mathematical tool for calculating probabilities of results of measurements? Different interpretations of the quantum mechanics (QM)…
We investigate the meaning of the wave function by analyzing the mass and charge density distributions of a quantum system. According to protective measurement, a charged quantum system has mass and charge density distributing in space,…
The analysis of the Doppler effect for photons in rotating systems, studied using the M\"ossbauer effect, confirms the general conclusions of a previous paper dedicated to experiments with photons emitted/absorbed by atoms/nuclei in…
Maxwell's equations in the vacuum can be formally cast in the form of Schr\"odinger's equation. Unfortunately, the vector to which this equation directly applies is not a wavefunction: its amplitude squared is not a probability density but…
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…
There are reasons to doubt that making sense of the wave function (other than as a probability algorithm) will help with the project of making sense of quantum mechanics. The consistency of the quantum-mechanical correlation laws with the…
Our paper Phys. Rev. D \textbf{79}, 093002 (2009), in which it was shown the paramagnetic behavior of photons propagating in magnetized vacuum, is criticized in Phys. Rev. D \textbf{81}, 105019, (2010) and even claimed that the photon has a…
Traditional textbook explanations of the Compton effect treat the photon electron interaction as a particle collision. This explanation is a pedagogical disaster, implying that sometimes interactions are particle-like whereas quantum…
The meaning of the wave function has been a hot topic of debate since the early days of quantum mechanics. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in this long-standing question. Is the wave function ontic, directly representing a…
Schroedinger's equation gave early quantum theory a visual language that looked like physics again: a wave evolving by a linear differential equation. This essay argues that the same success also seeded a recurring impulse to keep quantum…
It is generally argued that if the wave-function in the de Broglie--Bohm theory is a physical field, it must be a field in configuration space. Nevertheless, it is possible to interpret the wave-function as a multi-field in…