2024/05/03 by Farhad Khosravi, Li‐Ping Yang, Khosravi, Farhad +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Nonlinear Waves and Solitons #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.02143
openalex publication_date 2024/05/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) deals with the relativistic interaction of bosonic gauge fields and fermionic charged particles. In QED, global conservation laws of angular momentum for light-matter interactions are well-known. However, local conservation laws, i.e. the conservation law of angular momentum at every point in space, remain unexplored. Here, we use the QED Lagrangian and Noether's theorem to derive a new local conservation law of angular momentum for Dirac-Maxwell fields in the form of the continuity relation for linear momentum. We separate this local conservation law into four coupled motion equations for spin and orbital angular momentum (OAM) densities. We introduce a helicity current tensor, OAM current tensor, and spin-orbit torque in the motion equations to shed light on on the local dynamics of spin-OAM interaction and angular momentum exchange between Maxwell-Dirac fields. We elucidate how our results translate to classical electrodynamics using the example of plane wave interference as well as a dual-mode optical fiber. Our results shine light on phenomena related to the spin of gauge bosons.