Radiation, Matter and Anti-matter

In the previous lecture we discussed photons and electrons, and how they could both be thought of
as both particles and waves. In this lecture we will look in more detail at their properties, and
discover something rather surprising.
 Photons

Consider first the waves used to describe photons. For simplicity, we consider for the time being
waves in only one space dimension, x, which thus take the generic form
(x, t) sin 2(x/ t),
where (x, t) is the electromagnetic field, the wavelength of the waves and their frequency. The
waves are oscillations in both space and time.

Instead of sine waves, we may use cosine (or indeed some linear combination) this just shifts the
phase of the wave by a constant.
 Photons cont.

Because E = h, p = h/ , we can write instead

px Et
(x, t) sin ,
~
where we have defined ~ = h/2: this is a convenient notation to save having to keep writing 2.

Now these waves are solutions of the wave equation

!
@2 1 @2
(x, t) = 0.
@x 2 c 2 @t 2

This is because when we dierentiate the sine we get cosine, and thus if we dierentiate twice, we
get back sine (with a minus sign): so for our waves
2 2
@2 p @2 E
! , !
@x 2 ~ @t 2 ~
and thus they satisfy the wave equation provided

2 E2
p =
c2
and thus if E = pc. So these waves correspond to relativistic massless particles photons, as we
discussed in the previous lecture.
 Photons cont.

Note that if we shift x by a constant, x ! x + x0 , the wave equation remains unchanged, and thus
the wave too should remain unchanged, at least up to a phase. This symmetry implies that the
quantity p conjugate to x must remain fixed, and is thus conserved, i.e. momentum conservation,
just as in classical mechanics. Similarly time translation invariance, under t ! t + t0 , implies that
the energy E is conserved, since E is conjugate to t.

If we were now to write a similar wave equation for waves in two or three spatial dimensions, then we
would find that these equations also have a rotational invariance, ! + 0 , for some rotation
angle . This likewise implies a conservation law, in this case angular momentum L. The rotational
waves will have the generic form
L Et
sin .
~
However for rotations there is a further constraint: if we rotate through 2, ie all the way around a
circle, we should get back to where we started. But if ! + 2

L L 2L L
sin ! sin + = sin
~ ~ ~ ~
provided L/~ is an integer:
L = n~, n = 0, 1, 2, ...
So in quantum mechanics, angular momentum always comes in lumps of size ~.
 Photons cont.

We saw in the classical electromagnetism lecture that light waves can have two polarizations: the
waves rotate in either a left handed or right handed way, like a corkscrew. These rotations carry
angular momentum, and in the quantum theory this means that the photons themselves must have
an intrinsic angular momentum, called spin or helicity. In fact it turns out that this happens in a
very natural way: there are two spin states for photons: left handed photons L have spin +~,
and right handed photons R have spin ~. Thus when we have a lot of photons, some left and
some right handed, the total angular momentum is always an integer multiple of ~.