Description of Photon Motion

Burke Ritchie

Igor Balamut

A unified wave-phase description of the photon and of the motion of a material body is developed. The construction is based on the description of wave processes and on the preservation of their phase state as a fundamental principle, leading to Lorentz transformations and the structure of Minkowski spacetime without introducing them a priori. It is shown that the physically significant characteristic of a wave process is its phase state, which is preserved during evolution and acquires physical meaning only through the comparison of different processes. The wave invariant associated with the motion of a material body is factorized into two oppositely directed light-like components Q± = Ω ± cK = 2Ω_{l,±}, whose product, after a natural rescaling, takes the normalized form Q₊Q₋ = 1. In this representation, the parameters (Ω, K) are not independent quantities but are determined by the two light-like components: Ω characterizes their combined frequency content, whereas cK characterizes the asymmetry between them. Within the proposed framework, the Doppler shift is interpreted as a phase relation between wave processes, while relative velocity in special relativity corresponds to a Doppler asymmetry between the two light-like components of the wave process associated with motion. The resulting construction reproduces the kinematic structure of special relativity and provides a unified wave-phase description of the photon and of the motion of a material body.

Marko Toroš, Sara Restuccia, Graham M. Gibson +4 more

Photon interference and bunching are widely studied quantum effects that have also been proposed for high-precision measurements. Here, we construct a theoretical description of photon interferometry on rotating platforms, specifically exploring the relation between noninertial motion, relativity, and quantum mechanics. On the basis of this, we then propose an experiment where photon entanglement can be revealed or concealed solely by controlling the rotational motion of an interferometer, thus providing a route towards studies at the boundary between quantum mechanics and relativity.

Tore Wessel-Berg

Nikolas Tezak, Armand Niederberger, Dmitri S. Pavlichin +2 more

Following the simple observation that the interconnection of a set of quantum optical input-output devices can be specified using structural mode VHSIC hardware description language, we demonstrate a computer-aided schematic capture workflow for modelling and simulating multi-component photonic circuits. We describe an algorithm for parsing circuit descriptions to derive quantum equations of motion, illustrate our approach using simple examples based on linear and cavity-nonlinear optical components, and demonstrate a computational approach to hierarchical model reduction.