Field quantisation

Pierre Meystre, Murray Sargent

Robert G. Bennett, Thomas M. Barlow, Almut Beige

The notion that the electromagnetic field is quantised is usually inferred from observations such as the photoelectric effect and the black-body spectrum. However accounts of the quantisation of this field are usually mathematically motivated and begin by introducing a vector potential, followed by the imposition of a gauge that allows the manipulation of the solutions of Maxwell's equations into a form that is amenable for the machinery of canonical quantisation. By contrast, here we quantise the electromagnetic field in a less mathematically and more physically-motivated way. Starting from a direct description of what one sees in experiments, we show that the usual expressions of the electric and magnetic field observables follow from Heisenberg's equation of motion. In our treatment, there is no need to invoke the vector potential in a specific gauge and we avoid the commonly-used notion of a fictitious cavity that applies boundary conditions to the field.

Dietrich Marcuse

Yuan Hai-liang

From Maxwell equations for free space and by converting the amplitudes in Fourier expansion of the vector potential into operators according to quantisation correspondence,this paper obtains Hamiltonian operator,which quantises the electromagnetic field,and introduces the number state representation for the field.

Franco Gallone, Antonio Sparzani

The kinematical description of a classical system having a linear phase space can be quantised if a complexification is given over the symplectic space that supports the description; indeed, a complexification determines a Segal quantisation. The question of the uniqueness of the Segal quantisation arises since the quantum descriptions constructed through different Segal quantisations need not be equivalent. If the classical description contains also a symmetry group (represented by linear symplectic transformations; this means that one deals with systems having linear dynamics only), the complexification to determine a Segal quantisation that also quantises the symmetry group. The authors show that this requirement determines uniquely the complexification, and therefore the Segal quantisation, provided the symmetry group fulfils a (real) irreducibility condition. They apply this uniqueness criterion to the free neutral scalar field.