Nonlocality and the Rotating Wave Approximation

Foundations of Physics

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 639-651

  Clerk, A A ^a   Sipe, J E ^b  

^a School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032369282     PISSN: 00159018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1018717823725     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Gerhard C. Hegerfeldt, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 596 (1994).
2. Detlev Buchholz and Jakob Yngvason, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 613 (1994).
3. P. W. Milonni, D. F. V. James, and H. Fearn, Phys. Rev. A 52, 1525 (1995).
4. See, e.g., references cited in Ref. 1.
5. G. Compagno, G. M. Palma, R. Passante, and F. Perisco, Europhys. Lett. 9, 215 (1989).
6. G. Compagno, R. Passante, and F. Perisco, J. Mod. Opt. 37, 1377 (1990).
7. P. W. Milonni, The Quantum Vacuum (Academic Press, Boston, 1994), p. 119.
8. See, e.g., E. Power and T. Thirunamachandran, Phys. Rev. A 25, 2473 (1982).
9. In particular, W. P. Healy, Phys. Rev. A 22, 2891 (1980).
10. For a good overview, see W. P. Healy, Nonrelativistic Quantum Electrodynamics (Academic Press, London, 1982).
11. C. Cohen-Tannoudji, Photons and Atoms (Wiley, New York, 1989), p. 14.
12. Note that it is possible to have a field driven by a nonlocal source without having any real nonlocality in the system, if the field is not a properly observable quantity. For example, the standard Lagrangian of classical electrodynamics in the Coulomb gauge leads to a wave equation for the vector potential which is driven by the nonlocal transverse current density; however, as the vector potential is not a properly observable quantity, this is not indicative of any real nonlocality. The case discussed here is different, because it is the observable fields themselves, not the potentials, which are driven by nonlocal sources.