# What is the relation between electromagnetic wave and photon?

At the end of this nice video, she says that electromagnetic wave is a chain reaction of electric and magnetic fields creating each other so the chain of wave moves forward.

I wonder where the photon is in this explanation. What is the relation between electromagnetic wave and photon?

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Please see my answer here. You can understand Willis Lamb's frustration and the waves and normal modes describe the electromagnetic field. Photons are then the changes of number state of each normal mode - they are like the discrete "communications" the whole EM field has with the other quantum fields of the World that make up "empty space". One can reinterpret this statement as Maxwell's equations being the propagation equation for a lone "photon", but only in terms of propagation equations for the mean of electric and magnetic field .... –  WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance Dec 19 '13 at 0:48
...observables when the EM field is in a superposition of $n=1$ Fock states (so it is "one photon propagating"). –  WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance Dec 19 '13 at 0:49

Both the wave theory of light and the particle theory of light are approximations to a deeper theory called Quantum Electrodynamics (QED for short). Light is not a wave nor a particle but instead it is an excitation in a quantum field.

QED is a complicated theory, so while it is possible to do calculations directly in QED we often find it simpler to use an approximation. The wave theory of light is often a good approximation when we are looking at how light propagates, and the particle theory of light is often a good approximation when we are looking at how light interacts i.e. exchanges energy with something else.

So it isn't really possible to answer the question where the photon is in this explanation. In general if you're looking at a system, like the one in the video, where the wave theory is a good description of light you'll find the photon theory to be a poor description of light, and vice versa. The two ways of looking at light are complementary.

For example if you look at the experiment described in Anna's answer (which is one of the seminal experiments in understanding diffraction!) the wave theory gives us a good description of how the light travels through the Young's slits and creates the interference pattern, but it cannot describe how the light interacts with the photomultiplier used to record the image. By contrast the photon theory gives us a good explanation of how the light interacts with the photomultiplier but cannot describe how it travelled through the slits and formed the diffraction pattern.

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This is news because all QM teachers told me that photons abstractions, proposed by QED, which is more exact than wave discription. However, this should not stop us from figuring out how two are related. Actually quanta = particles. –  Val Dec 20 '13 at 18:09
@Val The way we actually calculate things in QED is with a perturbative expansion that involves photons. The underlying exact theory is one of several completely quantum fields. –  Kevin Driscoll Dec 20 '13 at 19:26

In this link there exists a mathematical explanation of how an ensemble of photons of frequency $\nu$ and energy $E=h\nu$ end up building coherently the classical electromagnetic wave of frequency $\nu$.

It is not simple to follow if one does not have the mathematical background. Conceptually watching the build up of interference fringes from single photons in a two slit experiment might give you an intuition of how even though light is composed of individual elementary particles, photons, the classical wave pattern emerges when the ensemble becomes large.

Figure 1. Single-photon camera recording of photons from a double slit illuminated by very weak laser light. Left to right: single frame, superposition of 200, 1’000, and 500’000 frames.

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In 1995 Willis Lamb published a provocative article with the title "Anti-photon", Appl. Phys. B 60, 77-84 (1995). As Lamb was one of the great pioneers of 20th century physics it is not easy to dismiss him as an old crank.

He writes in the introductory paragraph:

The photon concepts as used by a high percentage of the laser community have no scientific justification. It is now about thirty-five years after the making of the first laser. The sooner an appropriate reformulation of our educational processes can be made, the better.