I can get a good sense of what real physicists care about in physics forums such as the old s.p.r. (sci.physics.research) newsgroup or the current https://www.physicsforums.com/#physics.9 website. Quantum gravity/cosmology and neutrino issues seem to dominate. On the engineering side, practical application of quantum entanglement such as quantum computers generates a lot of discussion. I personally don’t feel that pursuing quantum gravity makes sense until we know a lot more about quantum theory–it’s kind of like building an airplane out of black boxes–we don’t know enough. I’d rather try to work out more at the quantum level before bringing in gravity.
As a consequence, I spend time on creating ideas for mathematical structures for quantum field theory. There are so many basic questions here, and the one that really grabs my attention: how are the various EM interactions related, and can I come up with a unifying model that obeys the interaction characteristics? There are four basic types of EM interactions (many others are variations and are not listed here):
| EM transaction type | causal? | momentum? |
| radiation pressure | yes | yes |
| charge force | yes | no |
| electron self resistance | yes | no |
| quantum interference/entanglement | no | no |
According to quantum field theory, these four interactions are all related to each other by quantized exchanges mediated by photons. The mathematical infrastructure is well established and no physicist bothers with studying why we get the different properties for each. The causal and momentum characteristics are explained as a variation of the wave versus particle perspective–radiation pressure results from true photon particle exchanges, whereas charge force uses virtual photons–interactions off the mass shell that only require energy conservation (net zero momentum) over an arbitrary delta time. On the other hand, quantum interference effects has the math infrastructure but no attempt to interpret that structure as virtual photons or anything else has been established.
So, here we have it–the math works, and no investigation into the why is done. The why is considered an interpretation and is regarded as a philosophical question not deserving of any serious study or grant money and research time. However, I look at those four transactions and wonder what makes them different–are virtual photons really related to true photons, and if so, how?
Here is what I came up with. You don’t have to agree that what I did represents reality, but my thinking process led me down this path. I am attempting to create a model that unifies these EM transactions and formulates a specific geometrical explanation for why virtual photons are different than quantized photons.
To start, I bring in the E=hv relation for quantized photons. This clearly indicates one degree of freedom–frequency, so an EM field (which has both frequency and magnitude, the magnitude dissipates over distance) cannot be used to model a single photon without constraining it somehow. Physics references often show light waves as oscillating E and B fields, but this recursive definition cannot be correct at the quantum level. Whatever field we choose to construct a quantized photon must only allow a frequency component, so this is why I propose an underlying unitary rotation vector field. EM field solutions to electron interactions require renormalization because of its central force behavior, but no such problem exists for this unitary rotation field. This unitary field cannot dissipate to zero–it’s just a rotation field, so zero magnitude makes no sense.
EM fields and particles must then be derivable from this precursor field, see prior posts on this website. Next, there must be a way to ensure a single unit of frequency cycles, because E=hv does not allow a photon with, for example, 1.5 times the energy of a single cycle photon. So… I conceptualized that this means there must be a lowest energy background state for this vector field. A single vector rotation (twist) that starts and stops on the background state. Finally, since there is good experimental evidence that there is no preferred direction in our universe dimension set R3, I proposed that there must be a rotation direction background state I that is normal to our three dimensions.
In this construction, photons form rotation waves in both the R3 and I (imaginary) directions (transforms constrained to SU(4)). Momentum transfer happens when a full rotation occurs from the background state direction all the way around back to the background state direction–this rotation carries momentum. Virtual particles are partial rotations away from the background I state that in a delta time fall back to this background state without having made a complete rotation, never expending a momentum transfer and thus conserving net zero energy. For example, electron self-field resistance, represented in the Standard Model with two types of virtual photon interactions, now becomes a result of electrons moving into a region of partial rotations that counters and slows down the bare electron’s LaGrangian solution to its path in time. I think it’s an elegant solution that gets rid of the renormalization issue in current Standard Model formulations because it eliminates the central force infinity of EM fields. I’ll work on the math for this in a later post (and perhaps a paper).
So far, this model doesn’t seem excessively speculative except for the creation of the I rotation background state, but even that appears to be required (I can’t think of any alternative way) to establish the quantization specified in E=hv. The math for this precursor field exactly matches a limiting case of the quantum oscillator model that sometimes is used to compute quantum mechanics. The unitary twist vector field model now creates a clear picture of the different EM transaction types, specifically how momentum and off-mass-shell behavior works. The model doesn’t have to represent reality–it just needs to map one-to-one to whatever reality actually does. If it does, it becomes a computable representation of reality that can be used to define higher level structures and interactions such as our particle zoo.
Let’s stop here for now and bring in details for the next post.
Agemoz
Agemoz's Physics Blog 