Elementary Theory of Angular Momentum

Angular Momentum

Quantum field theory of photons with orbital angular momentum

A quantum-field-theory approach is put forward to generalize the concept of classical spatial light beams carrying orbital angular momentum to the single-photon level. This quantization framework is carried out both in the paraxial and nonparaxial regimes. Upon extension to the optical phase space, closed-form expressions are found for a photon Wigner representation describing transformations o...

Relativistic theory of particles with arbitrary intrinsic angular momentum ( ∗ )

As is well known, Dirac’s theory of the electron makes use of a four-component wave function. When slow movements are considered, two of the components acquire negligible values, while the remaining two, at least in a first approximation, satisfy the Schrödinger equation. In a similar fashion, a particle having intrinsic angular momentum s h 2π (s = 0, 12 , 1, 3 2 , . . .) is described in quant...

Addition of Angular Momentum

5 Spin-Orbit coupling 9 5.1 The physical interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.2 Complete set of observables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.3 Level splitting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5.4 Computation of 1⊗ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Angular-momentum-insensitive quantum-defect theory for diatomic systems

We show that the highly excited rovibrational spectra of a diatomic molecule and the closely related slow atomic collision processes contain more systematics and require less parameters to characterize than the Rydberg spectrum of an atom. In the case of a single channel, e.g., we show that a single short-range parameter gives a complete description of slow collisions for practically all angula...