A simple geometrical interpretation of the photon position operator

Michal Dobrski, Maciej Przanowski, Jaromir Tosiek, Francisco J. Turrubiates

Published 2021-04-09Version 1

It is shown that the photon position operator $\hat{\vec{X}}$ with commuting components introduced by Margaret Hawton can be written in the momentum representation as $\hat{\vec{X}}=i \hat{\vec{D}}$, where $\hat{\vec{D}}$ is a flat connection in the tangent bundle $T(\mathbb{R} \setminus \{ (0,0,k_3) \in \mathbb{R}^3 : k_3 \geq 0\})$ over $\mathbb{R} \setminus \{ (0,0,k_3) \in \mathbb{R}^3 : k_3 \geq 0\}$ equipped with the Cartesian structure. Moreover, $\hat{\vec{D}}$ is such that the tangent $2$-planes orthogonal to the momentum are parallelly propagated with respect to $\hat{\vec{D}}$ and, also, $\hat{\vec{D}}$ is an anti-Hermitian operator with respect to the scalar product $\langle \mathbf{\Psi} | \hat{H}^{-2s} |\mathbf{\Phi} \rangle$. The eigenfunctions $\mathbf{\Psi}_{\vec{X}} (\vec{x})$ of the position operator $\hat{\vec{X}}$ are found.