No Arabic abstract
The duality symmetry between electricity and magnetism hidden in classical Maxwell equations suggests the existence of dual charges, which have usually been interpreted as magnetic charges and have not been observed in experiments. In quantum electrodynamics (QED), both the electric and magnetic fields have been unified into one gauge field $A_{mu}$, which makes this symmetry inconspicuous. Here, we recheck the duality symmetry of QED by introducing a dual gauge field. Within the framework of gauge-field theory, we show that the electric-magnetic duality symmetry cannot give any new conservation law. By checking charge-charge interaction and specifically the quantum Lorentz force equation, we find that the dual charges are electric charges, not magnetic charges. More importantly, we show that true magnetic charges are not compatible with the gauge-field theory of QED, because the interaction between a magnetic charge and an electric charge can not be mediated by gauge photons.
In this paper, a formulation, which is completely established on a quantum ground, is presented for basic contents of quantum electrodynamics (QED). This is done by moving away, from the fundamental level, the assumption that the spin space of bare photons should (effectively) possess the same properties as those of free photons observed experimentally. Within this formulation, bare photons with zero momentum can not be neglected when constructing the photon field; and an explicit expression for the related part of the photon field is derived. When a local gauge transformation is performed on the electron field, this expression predicts a change that turns out to be equal to what the gauge symmetry requires for the gauge field. This gives an explicit mechanism, by which the photon field may change under gauge transformations in QED.
The Newton--Hooke duality and its generalization to arbitrary power laws in classical, semiclassical and quantum mechanics are discussed. We pursue a view that the power-law duality is a symmetry of the action under a set of duality operations. The power dual symmetry is defined by invariance and reciprocity of the action in the form of Hamiltons characteristic function. We find that the power-law duality is basically a classical notion and breaks down at the level of angular quantization. We propose an ad hoc procedure to preserve the dual symmetry in quantum mechanics. The energy-coupling exchange maps required as part of the duality operations that take one system to another lead to an energy formula that relates the new energy to the old energy. The transformation property of {the} Green function satisfying the radial Schrodinger equation yields a formula that relates the new Green function to the old one. The energy spectrum of the linear motion in a fractional power potential is semiclassically evaluated. We find a way to show the Coulomb--Hooke duality in the supersymmetric semiclassical action. We also study the confinement potential problem with the help of the dual structure of a two-term power potential.
The concept of duality reflects a link between two seemingly different physical objects. An example in quantum mechanics is a situation where the spectra (or their parts) of two Hamiltonians go into each other under a certain transformation. We term this phenomenon as the energy-spectrum reflection symmetry. We develop an approach to this class of problems, based on the global properties of the Riemann surface of the quantum momentum function, a natural quantum-mechanical analogue to the classical momentum. In contrast to the algebraic method, which we also briefly review, our treatment provides an explanation to the long-noticed matching of the perturbative and WKB expansions of dual energy levels. Our technique also reveals the classical origins of duality.
We present detuning-dependent spectral and decay-rate measurements to study the difference between spectral and dynamical properties of single quantum dots embedded in micropillar and photonic-crystal cavities. For the micropillar cavity, the dynamics is well described by the dissipative Jaynes-Cummings model, while systematic deviations are observed for the emission spectra. The discrepancy for the spectra is attributed to coupling of other exciton lines to the cavity and interference of different propagation paths towards the detector of the fields emitted by the quantum dot. In contrast, quantitative information about the system can readily be extracted from the dynamical measurements. In the case of photonic crystal cavities we observe an anti crossing in the spectra when detuning a single quantum dot through resonance, which is the spectral signature of strong coupling. However, time-resolved measurements reveal that the actual coupling strength is significantly smaller than anticipated from the spectral measurements and that the quantum dot is rather weakly coupled to the cavity. We suggest that the observed Rabi splitting is due to cavity feeding by other quantum dots and/or multiexcition complexes giving rise to collective emission effects.
The ether concept -- abandoned for a long time but reinstated by Dirac in 1951-1953 -- has in recent years emerged into a fashionable subject in theoretical physics, now usually with the name of the Einstein-Dirac ether. It means that one special inertial frame is singled out, as the rest frame. What is emphasized in the present note, is that the idea is a natural example of the covariant theory of quantum electrodynamics in media if the refractive index is set equal to unity. A treatise on this case of quantum electrodynamics was given by the present author back in 1971, published then only within a preprint series. The present version is a brief summary of that formalism, with a link to the original paper. We think it is one of the first treatises on modern ether theory.