Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

A more photon-specific version of the Bloch sphere.

In it, each of the six sides has a clear and simple to understand photon polarization state, either of:

The sphere clearly suggests for example that a rotational or diagonal polarizations are the combination of left/right with the correct phase. This is clearly explained at: Video "Quantum Mechanics 9b - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat II by ViaScience (2013)".

This section discusses the pre-photon understanding of the polarization of light. For the photon one see: photon polarization.

polarization.com/history/history.html is a good page.

People were a bit confused when experiments started to show that light might be polarized. How could a wave that propages through a 3D homgenous material like luminiferous aether have polarization?? Light would presumably be understood to be analogous to a sound wave in 3D medium, which cannot have polarization. This was before Maxwell's equations, in the early 19th century, so there was no way to know.

Theory that describes electrons and photons really well, and as Feynman puts it "accounts very precisely for all physical phenomena we have ever observed, except for gravity and nuclear physics" ("including the laughter of the crowd" ;-)).

Learning it is one of Ciro Santilli's main intellectual fetishes.

While Ciro acknowledges that QED is intrinsically challenging due to the wide range or requirements (quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism), Ciro feels that there is a glaring gap in this moneyless market for a learning material that follows the Middle Way as mentioned at: the missing link between basic and advanced. Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979) is one of the best attempts so far, but it falls a bit too close to the superficial side of things, if only Feynman hadn't assumed that the audience doesn't know any mathematics...

The funny thing is that when Ciro Santilli's mother retired, learning it (or as she put it: "how photons and electrons interact") was also one of her retirement plans. She is a pharmacist by training, and doesn't know much mathematics, and her English was somewhat limited. Oh, she also wanted to learn how photosynthesis works (possibly not fully understood by science as that time, 2020). Ambitious old lady!!!

Experiments: quantum electrodynamics experiments.

Combines special relativity with more classical quantum mechanics, but further generalizing the Dirac equation, which also does that: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics. The name "relativistic" likely doesn't need to appear on the title of QED because Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so just having "electro-" in the title is enough.

Before QED, the most advanced theory was that of the Dirac equation, which was already relativistic but TODO what was missing there exactly?

As summarized at: youtube.com/watch?v=_AZdvtf6hPU?t=305 Quantum Field Theory lecture at the African Summer Theory Institute 1 of 4 by Anthony Zee (2004):

That video also mentions the interesting idea that:Therefore, for small timescales, energy can vary a lot. But mass is equivalent to energy. Therefore, for small time scale, particles can appear and disappear wildly.

QED is the first quantum field theory fully developed. That framework was later extended to also include the weak interaction and strong interaction. As a result, it is perhaps easier to just Google for "Quantum Field Theory" if you want to learn QED, since QFT is more general and has more resources available generally.

Like in more general quantum field theory, there is on field for each particle type. In quantum field theory, there are only two fields to worry about:

Quantum entanglement is often called spooky/surprising/unintuitive, but they key question is to understand why.

To understand that, you have to understand why it is fundamentally impossible for the entangled particle pair be in a predefined state according to experiments done e.g. where one is deterministically yes and the other deterministically down.

In other words, why local hidden-variable theory is not valid.

How to generate entangled particles:

Theoretical framework on which quantum field theories are based, theories based on framework include:so basically the entire Standard Model

The basic idea is that there is a field for each particle particle type.

E.g. in QED, one for the electron and one for the photon: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/166709/are-electron-fields-and-photon-fields-part-of-the-same-field-in-qed.

And then those fields interact with some Lagrangian.

One way to look at QFT is to split it into two parts:Then interwined with those two is the part "OK, how to solve the equations, if they are solvable at all", which is an open problem: Yang-Mills existence and mass gap.

There appear to be two main equivalent formulations of quantum field theory:

Talk title shown on intro: "Today's Answers to Newton's Queries about Light".

6 hour lecture, where he tries to explain it to an audience that does not know any modern physics. This is a noble effort.

Part of The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures lecture series.

Feynman apparently also made a book adaptation: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. That book is basically word by word the same as the presentation, including the diagrams.

According to www.feynman.com/science/qed-lectures-in-new-zealand/ the official upload is at www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 and Vega does show up as a watermark on the video (though it is too pixilated to guess without knowing it), a project that has been discontinued and has has a non-permissive license. Newbs.

4 parts:This talk has the merit of being very experiment oriented on part 2, big kudos: how to teach and learn physics

This experiment seems to be really hard to do, and so there aren't many super clear demonstration videos with full experimental setup description out there unfortunately.

Wikipedia has a good summary at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#Overview

For single-photon non-double-slit experiments see: single photon production and detection experiments. Those are basically a pre-requisite to this.

photon experiments:

electron experiments: single electron double slit experiment.

Non-elementary particle:

You can't get more direct than this in terms of proving that photons exist!

The particular case of the double-slit experiment will be discussed at: single particle double slit experiment.

Production:

Detectors are generally called photomultipliers:

Bibliography:

Spin is one of the defining properties of elementary particles, i.e. number that describes how an elementary particle behaves, much like electric charge and mass.

Possible values are half integer numbers: 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, and so on.

The approach shown in this section: Section "Spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics" shows what the spin number actually means in general. As shown there, the spin number it is a direct consequence of having the laws of nature be Lorentz invariant. Different spin numbers are just different ways in which this can be achieved as per different Representation of the Lorentz group.

Video 1. "Quantum Mechanics 9a - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat I by ViaScience (2013)" explains nicely how: