Description
Book SynopsisAdvances in technology often rely on a world of photons as the basic units of light. Increasingly one reads of photons as essential to enterprises in Photonics and Quantum Technology, with career and investment opportunities. Notions of photons have evolved from the energy-packet crowds of Planck and Einstein, the later field modes of Dirac, the seeming conflict of wave and particle photons, to the ubiquitous laser photons of today. Readers who take interest in contemporary technology will benefit from learning what photons are now considered to be, and how our views of photons have changed -- in learning about the various operational definitions that have been used for photons and their association with a variety of quantum-state manipulations that include Quantum Information, astronomical sources and crowds of photons, the boxed fields of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics and single photons on demand, the photons of Feynman and Glauber, and the photon constituents of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The narrative points to contemporary photons as causers of change to atoms, as carriers of messages, and as subject to controllable creation and alteration -- a considerable diversity of photons, not just one kind. Our Changing Views of Photons: A Tutorial Memoir presents those general topics as a memoir of the author''s involvement with physics and the photons of theoretical Quantum Optics, written conversationally for readers with no assumed prior exposure to science. It offers lay readers a glimpse of scientific discovery -- of how ideas become practical, as a small scientific community reconsiders its assumptions and offers the theoretical ideas that are then developed, revised, and adopted into technology for daily use. For readers who want a more detailed understanding of the theory, three substantial appendices provide tutorials that, assuming no prior familiarity, proceed from a very elementary start to basics of discrete states and abstract vector spaces; Lie groups; notions of quantum theory and the Schrödinger equation for quantum-state manipulation; Maxwell''s equations for electromagnetism, with wave modes that become photons, possibly exhibiting quantum entanglement; and the coupling of atoms and fields to create quasiparticles. The appendices can be seen as a companion to traditional textbooks on Quantum Optics.
Trade Review...understandable by anyone with an interest in science... * Christian brosseau, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Optics and Photonics News *
Table of ContentsPreface The Cartoons Introduction 1.1: Overview of the memoir narrative 1.2: Preliminaries: Defining terms 1.3: Models of physical phenomena 1.4: Caveats Basic background: Everyday physics and its math 2.1: Some mathematics 2.2: Particles: Elementary and structured 2.3: Aggregates: Fluids, flows, waves, and granules 2.4: Free space; the Vacuum 2.5: Forces and vectors 2.6: Energy and heat 2.7: Equations of change: Particles and fluids 2.8: Light: Electromagnetic radiation 2.9: Possible radiation granularity; Photons 2.10: Angular momentum: Orbital and spin 2.11: Probabilities 2.12: Quantum states The photons of P;anck, Einstein and Bohr 3.1: Thermal light: Planck quanta 3.2: Spectroscopy: Photons as energy packets 3.3: Discrete energies of atoms 3.4: The Bohr-Einstein emission and absorption photons 3.5: The photoelectric effect; The Einstein photon 3.6: Scattered photons: Doppler and Compton 3.7: Revised views of Planck, Einstein and Compton photons 3.8: Beyond emitted and absorbed quanta 3.9: Bohr The Photons of Dirac 4.1: Modes: Electron orbitals and cavity radiation; Superpositions 4.2: Dirac's photons: Mode increments 4.3: Emission and absorption photons 4.4: Comment: Next steps Photons as population changers 5.1: Interactions, decoherence and ensembles 5.2: Einstein-equation populations; Equilibrium 5.3: Einstein-equation photons; Lasers 5.4: Coherent population changes 5.5: Rabi oscillations 5.6: Assured two-state excitation 5.7: Single atoms, single boxed photons 5.8: The Jaynes-Cummings model; Evidence for photons 5.9: Coherent change; Interaction linkages 5.10: Morris-Shore photons 5.11: Pulsed excitation 5.12: Objectives of quantum-state manipulations; Superpositions Photon messengers 6.1: Astronomical photons 6.2: Scattered photons 6.3: Electrical circuits 6.4: Information 6.5: Photons as information carriers 6.6: The no-cloning theorem 6.7: Correlation and entaglement Manipulating photons 7.1: Particle conservation 7.2: Creating single photons 7.3: Detecting photons 7.4: Altering photons 7.5: Storing and restoring photons 7.6: Verifying photons Overview; Ways of regarding photons 8.1: Historical photons 8.2: Pulsed photons 8.3: Steady, Feynman photons 8.4: Crowds and singles 8.5: Interacting photons 8.6: Doing without photons 8.7: Alternatives to photons 8.8: Contemporary evidence for photons 8.9: Photons in biology Finale 9.1: A concluding thought 9.2: Basic reference 9.3: Acknowledgements Appendix A: Atoms and their mathematics A.1: Classical equations of particle motion A.2: Measurement; Sizes A.3: Abstract vector spaces A.4: Quantization A.5: Wave mechanics and wavefunctions A.6: Phase space A.7: Matrix mechanics and operators A.8: The statevector A.9: The time-dependant Schrodinger equation A.10: Two-state coherent excitation A.11: Degeneracies and ensembles A.12: Adiabatic elimination; Multiphoton interaction A.13: Adiabatic change A.14: Density matrices and mixed states A.15: Three-state pulsed coherent excitation A.16: Radiative rate equations A.17: Alegebras A.18: Group theory A.19: The Standard Model of particle physics Appendix B: Radiation and photons B.1: Electromagnetic equations in free space B.2: Classical field modes; Examples B.3: Quantized field modes; Dirac photons B.4: Photon number-statesuperpositions B.5: Temporal variations; Quantum character B.6: Alternative views of photons B.7: Thermal equilibrium; Planck photons B.8: Incoherent radiation; Photon crowds Appendix C: Couples atom and field equations C.1: The Maxwell equations in matter C.2: Bulk-matter steady response C.3: Bulk-matter transient sources C.4: The atom-photon Hamiltonian C.5: The Jaynes-Cummings model C.6: Cavity STIRAP C.7: Paired, product spaces; Entanglement C.8: The annual greeting cards References Index
