One of the interesting asymmetries in physics involve photons and charged forces. Photons have been observed to carry positive momentum from an atom to a detector (for example, another atom with electrons that can be knocked free, forming an electric current that can be measured). We can also measure the radiation pressure of photons, always exerting force away from the source. Finally, we can observe photon interactions in the form of electromagnetic forces between particles.
Charged forces are attributed to photons, both real and virtual, and are measured to be either attractive or repulsive. By symmetry, I would expect photons could also carry negative momentum, observable in antimatter atoms emitting antiphotons or as negative radiation pressure toward the source emitter.
We see negative momentum via charge attraction forces, but we don’t see attractive radiation pressure. Hence, I thought it logical to assume the existence of negative momentum photons–antiphotons.
I actually arrived at this conclusion from a different path–the photon model in the unitary rotation vector field theory has neither mass or momentum of its own but can carry either positive or negative momentum from a source to a destination. For this reason, I predicted the existence of antiphotons, but shortly thereafter realized that even if you don’t believe the unitary rotation vector field theory, antiphotons should exist by symmetry.
That was a daring statement to make–and it makes me nervous, because we’ve done enough high-energy particle collisions with antiparticles that I would have suspected we would have seen evidence of antiphotons. Both the asymmetry of the photon mediating charged interactions and the promising studies of the unitary rotation vector field suggest that antiphotons should be common in antiparticle interactions. In addition, the lack of antimatter in the universe strongly suggests an asymmetry in how gravity and radiation pressure affect formation of stars. Stars cannot exist without a balance of radiation pressure and gravity–if radiation pressure is negative, it will not form a stable state with gravity to form stars.
So, lots of good evidence that antiphotons should exist–so why don’t we see them? Either they are really hard to distinguish from photons, or are really hard to generate, or they don’t exist. I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and realized that studying charge forces using the unitary rotation vector field might suggest the correct answer.
According to quantum field theory, electric and magnetic forces are mediated by photons. Looking at the LaGrange equations of motion for electron/photon interactions, you can get both positive and negative momentum solutions for the photon wave equation, and in the standard model, attractive forces are interpreted to be photons interacting with an EM field via constructor/annihilator operators. In addition, virtual photons can exist for bounded spacetime neighborhoods that don’t conserve momentum.
The crucial question here is–why the asymmetry? Why couldn’t you interpret this in a symmetric way simply by saying the negative LaGrange solutions are simply photons carrying negative momentum–antiphotons? As mentioned previously, there’s many good reasons to think antiphotons should exist. But we don’t! Why not? We have negative momentum charge (attractive forces), but no observed negative radiation pressure, even though both are mediated by photons. We see no antimatter stars in astronomy, strongly suggesting that such stars do have negative radiation pressure, yet we see no evidence of an antimatter protostar cloud collapsing rather than assuming a stable state in the form of a star.
One answer is that antiphotons are hard to detect. An experiment to observe an anti-atom emit an antiphoton is going to be difficult to set up. You would have to have a detector that could tell the difference between an antiphoton and a photon. As I suggested in a previous post, this might be a positron brehmstrallung experiment that measures the tiny radiation pressure from antiphotons generated by positrons travelling through a magnetic field. Maybe the reason has simply been that no one has looked for an antiphoton, after all, we’ve been taught for so long that photons are their own antiparticle, there is no such thing.
Although I thought the derivation of antiphotons from the unitary rotation vector field was clever, I really have doubts. I think we would have seen antiphotons in high energy collisions creating a negative momentum collision track. There’s good reason to believe that antiphotons should exist, yet there has to be a reason why we don’t see negative momentum carrying photons, but do see negative carrying charge forces.
For this to make sense, the answer may be much more controversial: that photon mediated charge forces and photon radiation pressure forces involve photon particles that are different in some way. If photons cannot carry negative momentum, we are forced to conclude that charge forces are not mediated by the same particles as radiation particles–a theory that goes against the well tested Standard Model. Alternatively, we could decide the issue has to do with the difference between photons and virtual photons (or similarly, quantized photons versus the quantized EM field), but it is very clear to me that neither case can explain the observed asymmetry in photon mediated interactions.
I think insight into the question of antiphoton existence and the charge force asymmetry question can be found by looking at the way the unitary rotation vector field addresses these photon interactions. Since this post is already long, I’ll present my observations in my next post.
Agemoz
Agemoz's Physics Blog 