Understanding light quanta: The Photon

A. C. de la Torre

Published 2004-10-22, updated 2005-07-28Version 2

An antisymmetric tensor, the photon tensor, is defined for the description of the photon as a massless relativistic particle. The photon can be visualized as an essentially two dimensional rotating object. The quantum mechanical description of a single photon is presented and it is shown that it is wrong to associate the quantum states of a photon with the macroscopic electromagnetic fields. This work is part of a series devoted to the attempt to understand the quantum of electromagnetic radiation, based on the assumption that the photons are the primary ontology and that the electromagnetic fields are macroscopic emergent properties of an ensemble of photons.