{"paper":{"title":"Quantum Mechanics of a Photon","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"quant-ph","authors_text":"Ali Mostafazadeh, Hassan Babaei","submitted_at":"2016-08-23T12:08:30Z","abstract_excerpt":"A first quantized free photon is a complex massless vector field $A=(A^\\mu)$ whose field strength satisfies Maxwell's equations in vacuum. We construct the Hilbert space $\\mathscr{H}$ of the photon by endowing the vector space of the fields $A$ in the temporal-Coulomb gauge with a positive-definite and relativistically invariant inner product. We give an explicit expression for this inner product, identify the Hamiltonian for the photon with the generator of time translations in $\\mathscr{H}$, determine the operators representing the momentum and the helicity of the photon, and introduce a chi"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1608.06479","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}