The Faraday Effect as a Two-State Quantum Process

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum-mechanical model of the Faraday effect using a two-state system and quantized electromagnetic fields, emphasizing its nature as a forward Rayleigh scattering process rather than refractive index differences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quantum two-state model for the Faraday effect that does not rely on classical refractive index differences.

Findings

The Faraday effect can be derived from a two-state quantum model.

The model treats the effect as a forward Rayleigh scattering process.

It highlights the quantum-mechanical aspects of the phenomenon.

Abstract

We show that the Faraday effect can be derived from a simple two-state model. This approach uses a quantized electromagnetic field and does not make reference to differences in refractive indices of left- and right-circularly polarized light. Instead it treats the effect as a forward Rayleigh scattering process between two orthogonal modes of the quantized field, and thus emphasises the quantum-mechanical aspects of the phenomenon.