The Nature of Light: What is a Photon? [Paperback]

Gathering contributions from globally recognized specialists in electrodynamics and quantum optics, the book begins by clearly presenting the mainstream view of the nature of light and photons. It then provides a new and challenging scientific epistemology that explains how to overcome the prevailing paradoxes and confusions arising from the accepted definition of a photon as a monochromatic Fourier mode of the vacuum. The book concludes with an array of experiments that demonstrate the innovative thinking needed to examine the wave-particle duality of photons.

Looking at photons from both mainstream and out-of-box viewpoints, this volume is sure to inspire the next generation of quantum optics scientists and engineers to go beyond the Copenhagen interpretation and formulate new conceptual ideas about lightmatter interactions and substantiate them through inventive applications.Light Reconsidered. What Is a Photon?. What Is a Photon?. The Concept of the PhotonRevisited. A Photon Viewed from Wigner Phase Space. Inevitable Incompleteness of All Theories: An Epistemology to Continuously Refine Human Logics Toward Cosmic Logics. Single Photons Have Not Been Detected: The Alternative Photon Clump Model. What Is a Photon?. Oh Photon, Photon, Whither Art Thou Gone?. A Conclusive Experiment on Wave-Particle Duality of Light?. The Photon Wave Function. Photons Are Fluctuations of a Random (Zeropoint) Radiation Filling the Whole Space. Violation of the Principle of Complementarity and Its Implications. The Bohr Model of the Photon. The Maxwell Wave Function of the Photon. Modeling Light Entangled in Polarization and Frequency: Case Study in Quantum Cryptography. PhotonThe Minimum DoslÓ,