A Comment on the "Photon position operator with commuting components" by Margaret Hawton

2022/03/28 by A. Jadczyk, Jadczyk, A., Agnieszka Matylda Schlichtinger +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.14555

openalex publication_date 2022/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We show that the position operator with commuting components proposed by M. Hawton [M. Hawton, Phys. Rev. A \bf 59, 954 (1999)] and developed in subsequent papers, including the recent ones, does not have the properties required for a photon position operator. Depending on the exact interpretation of the results it either concerns a triplet of massless spin zero particles rather than the photon, or does not have the required covariance properties under space rotations.

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