English

Photon polarization and Wigner's little group

Quantum Physics 2009-11-10 v2

Abstract

To discuss one-photon polarization states we find an explicit form of the Wigner's little group element in the massless case for arbitrary Lorentz transformation. As is well known, when analyzing the transformation properties of the physical states, only the value of the phase factor is relevant. We show that this phase factor depends only on the direction of the momentum k/k\vec{k}/|\vec{k}| and does not depend on the frequency k0k^0. Finally, we use this observation to discuss the transformation properties of the linearly polarized photons and the corresponding reduced density matrix. We find that they transform properly under Lorentz group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0304120,
  title  = {Photon polarization and Wigner's little group},
  author = {Pawel Caban and Jakub Rembielinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0304120},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Version published in Phys. Rev. A, few typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-07-22T19:39:05.727Z