Hodgson, D, Southall, J, Purdy, R et al. (1 more author) (2022) Local Photons. Frontiers in Photonics, 3. 978855. ISSN 2673-6853
Abstract
The classical free-space solutions of Maxwell’s equations for light propagation in one dimension include wave packets of any shape that travel at the speed of light. This includes highly-localised wave packets that remain localised at all times. Motivated by this observation, this paper builds on recent work by Southall et al. [J. Mod. Opt. 68, 647 (2021)] and shows that a local description of the quantised electromagnetic field, which supports such solutions and which must overcome several no-go theorems, is indeed possible. Starting from the assumption that the basic building blocks of photonic wave packets are so-called bosons localised in position (blips), we identify the relevant Schrödinger equation and construct Lorentz-covariant electric and magnetic field observables. In addition we show that our approach simplifies to the standard description of quantum electrodynamics when restricted to a subspace of states.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
|
||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 Hodgson, Southall, Purdy and Beige. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Keywords: | quantum electrodynamics, quantum optics, quantum field theory, field quantisation, photon localisation | ||||
Dates: |
|
||||
Institution: | The University of Leeds | ||||
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Physics Teaching (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Theoretical Physics (Leeds) |
||||
Funding Information: |
|
||||
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications | ||||
Date Deposited: | 25 Aug 2022 12:30 | ||||
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 23:05 | ||||
Status: | Published | ||||
Publisher: | Frontiers Media | ||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fphot.2022.978855 |