Interactions Between Evanescent Photons and Environment

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties and interactions of evanescent waves in various setups, revealing new behaviors such as complex energy eigenvalues and evanescence exchange, and suggests experimental observation methods.

Contribution

It introduces new properties of evanescent waves, including complex eigenvalues and evanescence exchange, linking them to Gamow states and proposing experimental detection.

Findings

Evanescent waves exhibit complex energy eigenvalues with a movable screen.

Evanescence exchange occurs between EW2 and the environment.

A simple experiment is proposed to observe EW2 imprints in the far field.

Abstract

The evanescent waves named as EW1, EW2, EW3 are described in 3 respective experimental setups: 1) total internal reflection; 2) scattering on an inhomogeneous planar target; and 3) propagation along a waveguide. Some interactions are considered between EW2 and the environment. The latter may include a beam of probing particles and/or the screen on which the EW2 are formed. Some new properties of EW are described, such as complex energy eigenvalues in case of a movable screen, and evanescence exchange between the interacting objects. This reveals the connection between evanescent states and the Gamow states of the studied system. The 4-momentum exchange between EW2 and the probe is highly selective and may collapse the superposition of studied EW2- eigenstates to a single EW-eigenstate of the probing particle. Possible imprints of EW2 in the far field are briefly discussed and a simple experiment is suggested for their observation. .