Posted: Sep 15, 2011 1:30 pm
This paper talks about "first quantization" to describe photons. Just elemerntary stuff.
Couldn't access this paper, requires registration.
Basic elementary QED. The stuff on radioastronomy is interesting.
Here the author relates to electric and magnetic fields. This work is appropriate when large number of photons are involved. What's amusing is that it treats gauge transformation as if it was something new when in reality it was established in the 1950's by Yang, who based his work on Landau back in the 1930's.
Here the author stresses that Maxwell equations pertain to a single photon. Cute.
Another work that tries to relate the Maxwell equation directly to the Schroedinger equation.
..................................................................................................................................................
To be honest, twistor, if you want to study QFT, Weinberg is THE book. All that stuff you linked to is passé.
zaybu wrote:All particles are subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It's just that fermions obey different statistics than bosons. The only time you will need to consider waves is when you are dealing with a large number of photons. In that case, the wave picture gives you adequate results. But when you deal with one on one: one photon with one electron, or two electrons exchanging a photon, then the particle picture is the only one that makes sense. Either that or you might as well throw Feynman's diagrams under the bus.
Imagine I have an ideal experimental setup - an optical cavity, and I put a single quantum of monochromatic light in there. Would you really want to call that a "particle" ?
Yes, if it's a "single" quantum, it will behave like a particle. The hard trick is to produce a "single" quantum one at a time. The youtube video I linked you to did just that. And the presence of tiny grains appearing one by one on the screen testifies to the particle nature of the photon.
Incidentally, do you think that two electrons really exchange photons when paticipating in the electromagnetic interaction ?
That's what QED says. Do you have a better theory?
Also, we get the W+, W-, Z boson mediating the weak force, and gluons for the strong force. Are you saying that the Standard model is wrong?