Photon topology

TL;DR

This paper explores the topological properties of photon bundles in vacuum, revealing nontrivial Chern numbers for circular polarizations, and develops a new formalism for photon representation and quantization that resolves longstanding issues.

Contribution

It introduces a topological framework for photon bundles, avoiding singularities in Wigner's little group method, and demonstrates the global definability of R- and L-photon states and their quantization.

Findings

R- and L-photons form topologically nontrivial subbundles with Chern numbers 2

Photon wave function can be uniquely split into R- and L-components

The spin-Chern number of photons is not purely topological

Abstract

The topology of photons in vacuum is interesting because there are no photons with $\boldsymbol{k}=0$, creating a hole in momentum space. We show that while the set of all photons forms a trivial vector bundle $\gamma$ over this momentum space, the $R$- and $L$-photons form topologically nontrivial subbundles $\gamma_\pm$ with first Chern numbers $\mp2$. In contrast, $\gamma$ has no linearly polarized subbundles, and there is no Chern number associated with linear polarizations. It is a known difficulty that the standard version of Wigner's little group method produces singular representations of the Poincar\'{e} group for massless particles. By considering representations of the Poincar\'{e} group on vector bundles we obtain a version of Wigner's little group method for massless particles which avoids these singularities. We show that any massless bundle representation of the Poincar\'{e} group can be canonically decomposed into irreducible bundle representations labeled by helicity, which in turn can be associated to smooth irreducible Hilbert space representations. This proves that the $R$- and $L$-photons are globally well-defined as particles and that the photon wave function can be uniquely split into $R$- and $L$-components. This formalism offers a method of quantizing the EM field without invoking discontinuous polarization vectors as in the traditional scheme. We also demonstrate that the spin-Chern number of photons is not a purely topological quantity. Lastly, there has been an extended debate on whether photon angular momentum can be split into spin and orbital parts. Our work explains the precise issues that prevent this splitting. Photons do not admit a spin operator; instead, the angular momentum associated with photons' internal degree of freedom is described by a helicity-induced subalgebra corresponding to the translational symmetry of $\gamma$.