Storming Majorana's Tower with OAM states of light in a plasma

TL;DR

This paper explores how structured plasma environments impart orbital angular momentum to photons, affecting their effective mass and revealing analogies with quantum gravity and relativity models.

Contribution

It generalizes Majorana's solution to show that photons with OAM in plasma cannot have negative squared mass states, linking plasma physics to quantum gravity concepts.

Findings

Photons in plasma can acquire OAM, reducing their effective Proca mass.

Photons with OAM cannot assume negative squared mass states in plasma.

Analogies are drawn between plasma photon behavior and quantum gravity models.

Abstract

We extend the relationship between mass and spin angular momentum, described by the bosonic spectrum of positive definite mass particles of the Majorana solution to the Dirac equation, to photons that acquire an effective Proca mass through the Anderson-Higgs mechanism when they propagate in a plasma. In an earlier paper we showed that if the plasma is structured, it can impart orbital angular momentum (OAM) to the photons that reduces the total Proca photon mass. Here we show, through a generalisation of Majorana's solution, that photons with OAM in a plasma cannot assume negative squared mass states. This means that there exist interesting analogies with Quantum Gravity or General Relativity models involving a modified action of the Lorentz group.