No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
Source-free so-called ModMax theories of nonlinear electrodynamics in the four dimensional Minkowski spacetime vacuum are the only possible continuous deformations -- and as a function of a single real and positive parameter -- of source-free Maxwell linear electrodynamics in the same vacuum, which preserve all the same Poincare and conformal spacetime symmetries as well as the continuous duality invariance of Maxwells theory. Null field configurations of the latter however, including null electromagnetic knots, are singular for the Lagrangian formulation of any spacetime Poincare and conformal invariant theory of nonlinear electrodynamics. In particular null hopfion-Ra~nada knots are a distinguished and fascinating class on their own of topologically nontrivial solutions to Maxwells equations. This work addresses the fate of these configurations within ModMax theories. A doubled class of ModMax deformed hopfion-Ra~nada knots is thereby identified, each of which coalescing back in a continuous fashion to the original hopfion-Ra~nada knot when the nonlinear deformation parameter is turned off.
In this paper we correct previous work on magnetic charge plus a photon mass. We show that contrary to previous claims this system has a very simple, closed form solution which is the Dirac string potential multiplied by a exponential decaying part. Interesting features of this solution are discussed, namely, (i) the Dirac string becomes a real feature of the solution, (ii) the breaking of gauge symmetry via the photon mass leads to a breaking of the rotational symmetry of the monopoles magnetic field, (iii) the Dirac quantization condition is potentially altered.
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.
It is shown that there exists a new physical reality -- the $Psi$--ether. All the achievements of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are due to the fact that both the theories include the influence of $Psi$--ether on the physical processes occurring in the Universe. Physics of the XXth century was first of all the physics of $Psi$--ether.