XII. On The Question of The Polarization of Radiation in The Quantum Theory

J. Robert Oppenheimer

C.C. Goodyear

William H. Louisell McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. Ltd. 1964. Pp. xii + 303. Price 116s. This is a textbook which aims to introduce to the graduate physicist or electrical engineer those aspects of quantum field theory and quantum statistics which are necessary for a basic understanding of such processes as the absorption and spontaneous emission of radiation, quantum fluctuations and quantum noise. With the advent of devices such as the maser, this text fills a definite need.

Jan Tuziemski, Piotr Witas, Jarosław K. Korbicz

Broadly understood decoherence processes in quantum electrodynamics, induced by neglecting either the radiation [L. Landau, Z. Phys. 45, 430 (1927)] or the charged matter [N. Bohr and L. Rosenfeld, K. Danske Vidensk. Selsk, Math.-Fys. Medd. XII, 8 (1933)], have been studied from the dawn of the theory. However, what happens in between, when a part of the radiation may be observed, as is the case in many real-life situations, has not been analyzed yet. We present such an analysis for a nonrelativistic, pointlike charge and thermal radiation. In the dipole approximation, we solve the dynamics and show that there is a regime where, despite the noise, the observed field carries away almost perfect and hugely redundant information about the charge momentum. We analyze a partial charge-field state and show that it approaches a so-called spectrum broadcast structure.

Norman M. Kroll

Albert Einstein