Timeline for Are photons inside the media massive? If yes, why there is no Meissner effect?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:39 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://physics.stackexchange.com/ with https://physics.stackexchange.com/
|
|
| Sep 14, 2015 at 15:41 | comment | added | Rococo | @WetSavannaAnimalakaRodVance Thanks but it is really a rather bogus argument to be honest. But don't worry, I have a rebuttal to myself in the works ;). | |
| Sep 14, 2015 at 15:11 | comment | added | pathintegral | OK. Assuming photon IS massive and there is the analog of Meissner effect, I came up with this estimate. Light energy is of order of eV, this should the. also be the order of magnitude of quasi-photon mass. This ~1eV energy corresponds to a screening length scale of 1$\mu m$, which is nothing but typical light wavelength. This is consistent with @WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance's calculation. So the question is still open... | |
| Sep 14, 2015 at 6:49 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @Rococo BTW, you may still be onto something (I wondered whether I should say anything at all). I make the Yukawa decay constant for a mass of $1eV$ to be $\hbar/(m\,c)\approx 0.2{\rm \mu m}$, so that doesn't seem to explain things, at least if one does a naive calculation like this. | |
| Sep 14, 2015 at 1:54 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @Rococo Most elegant thinking: very good point. Although a globally constant refractive index has a Hilbert transform of nought. | |
| Sep 14, 2015 at 1:44 | comment | added | Rococo | @pathintegral, I think this might be on the right track. Any medium with a refractive index must necessarily have a non-zero absorption (due to Kramers-Kroenig), so light will always be attenuated in something like an exponential way as in the Beer-Lambert law. One could then choose to interpret this as the behavior of a Yukawa field with associated photon mass, we just generally don't use that picture in normal materials in practice. | |
| Sep 13, 2015 at 21:32 | comment | added | Selene Routley | @pathintegral Careful - I said the massive disturbance in a medium has a non-Lorentz covariant equation. The Proca equation is Lorentz covariant. | |
| Sep 13, 2015 at 19:53 | comment | added | pathintegral | However, I don't quite agree that the equation for a massive photon is not Lorentz-covariant -- There are plenty of massive particles that are described by relativistic QFT. | |
| Sep 13, 2015 at 19:52 | comment | added | pathintegral | Thanks! I'm particularly impressed by that even for n=1.5, v~2/3 c, the mass of the photon is still very small. I suspect that if one compares this mass with the mass of photon in the superconductor, one can explain why Meissner effect is not observed in regular media. | |
| Sep 13, 2015 at 5:43 | history | answered | Selene Routley | CC BY-SA 3.0 |