English

Locally-acting mirror Hamiltonians

Quantum Physics 2021-09-23 v6

Abstract

Photons, i.e. the basic energy quanta of monochromatic waves, are highly non-localised and occupy all available space in one dimension. This non-local property can complicate the modelling of the quantised electromagnetic field in the presence of optical elements that are local objects. Therefore, in this paper, we take an alternative approach and quantise the electromagnetic field in position space. Taking into account the negative- {\em and} the positive-frequency solutions of Maxwell's equations, we construct annihilation operators for highly-localised field excitations with bosonic commutator relations. These provide natural building blocks of wave packets of light and enable us to construct locally-acting interaction Hamiltonians for two-sided semi-transparent mirrors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.07597,
  title  = {Locally-acting mirror Hamiltonians},
  author = {Jake Southall and Daniel Hodgson and Robert Purdy and Almut Beige},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07597},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

21 pages, 1 figure, revised version, co-author added

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:52:40.428Z