[General] Photonic electron and spin: the heart of the problem

[John Duffield]

Chip:

No, I was just trying to describe the photon as a extended-entity wave thing, and highlight the fact that it isn’t some kind of point-particle. Photon spin is said to be around the direction of propagation. like this picture:

  

...from this article: http://mathpages.com/rr/s9-04/9-04.htm. Things like water waves are a good place to start, but a photon isn’t exactly like a water wave.  

Regards
John


From: Chip Akins 
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 10:17 PM
To: 'Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion' 
Subject: Re: [General] Photonic electron and spin: the heart of the problem

Hi John

 

So are you saying that the “spin” component of a planar polarized photon is not in a direction perpendicular to the longitudinal direction of travel, but rather in the plane of polarization?

 

Chip

 

From: General [mailto:general-bounces+chipakins=gmail.com at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] On Behalf Of John Duffield
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 10:02 AM
To: 'Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion'
Subject: Re: [General] Photonic electron and spin: the heart of the problem

 

Chip, 

 

Re: It seems there have been experiments where plane polarized photons were passed through a polarizer and the spin of those photons measured after the polarizer.  As I understand it the spin was still +/- h bar.  Has this actually been done? How can that be explained casually? Even in consideration of the relativistic photon time and distance transformations, I cannot causally justify this experiment, unless the photon in this case, is a plane wave, with a spin angular moment force component, and not a physical spin. Thoughts anyone?

 

I recommend you start with water waves. You can imagine a vertical polarization in that the wave goes up and down, not side to side. But it isn’t just up and down, the red test particle goes round and round. There’s still an h-bar rotation that relates to the wave height. Imagine the wave height is always the same. It’s a sine wave, but the rotation is perfectly real, that spin isn’t imaginary, it’s physical.... 
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