Description
Despite the success of quantum mechanics in predicting the final outcome of experiments, there are built-in limitations that hinder our discovery of actual processes in the micro world. The Nature of Light: What is a Photon highlights the potential of optics and quantum optics to bring about major advances in understanding the real nature of photons and thereby open the door to many new technological applications. Challenging fundamental theory and considering new ways of thinking, international contributors discuss topics, such as single photon interference, photon diffraction based on virtual particle exchange, the Bohr model, propagating topological singularities, and the photon wave function.
Contents
Sect. 1 Critical Reviews of Mainstream Photon Model
1 Light Reconsidered
2 What Is a Photon?
3 What Is a Photon?
4 The Concept of the Photon-Revisited
5 A Photon Viewed from Wigner Phase Space
Sect. 2 Epistemological Origin of Logical Contradiction
6 Inevitable Incompleteness of All Theories: An Epistemology to Continuously Refine Human Logics Towards Cosmic Logics
7 "Single Photons" Have not Been Detected: The Alternative "Photon Clump" Model
Sect. 3 Exploring Photons beyond Mainstream Views
8 What Is a Photon?
9 Oh Photon, Photon; Whither Art Thou Gone?
10 The Photon Wave Function
11 Photons Are Fluctuations of a Random (Zeropoint) Radiation Filling the Whole Space
12 Violation of the Principle of Complementarity and Its Implications
13 The Bohr Model of the Photon
14 The Maxwell Wave Function of the Photon
15 Modeling Light Entangled in Polarization andFrequency: Case Study in Quantum Cryptography
16 Photon-The Minimum Dose of Electromagnetic Radiation
17 Propagating Topological Singularities: Photons
18 The Photon: A Virtual Reality
19 The Photon and Its Measurability
20 Phase Coherence in Multiple Scattering: Weak and Intense Monochromatic Light Wave Propagating in Cold Strontium Cloud
21 The Nature of Light: Description of Photon Diffraction Based Upon Virtual Particle Exchage
22 What Physics Is Encoded in Maxwell's Equations?
23 From Quantum to Classical: Watching a Single Photon Become a Wave
24 If Superposed Light Beams Do not Re-Distribute Their Energy in the Absence of Detectors (Material Dipoles), Can a Single Indivisible Photon Interfere?
25 What Processes Are behind Energy Re-Direction and Re- Distribution in Interference and Diffraction?
26 Do We Count Indivisible Photons or Discrete Quantum Events Experienced by Detectors?
27 Direct Measurement of Light Waves
Index