Abstract
Propagation of photons (or of any spin-1 boson) is of interest in different kinds of nontrivial background, including a thermal bath, or a background magnetic field, or both. We give a unified treatment of all such cases, casting the problem as a matrix eigenvalue problem. The matrix in question is not a normal matrix, and therefore care should be given to distinguish the right eigenvectors from the left eigenvectors. The polarization vectors are shown to be right eigenvectors of this matrix, and the polarization sum formula is seen as the completeness relation of the eigenvectors. We show how this method is successfully applied to different nontrivial backgrounds.
- Received 30 May 2020
- Accepted 22 July 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.036004
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society
