Energy and momentum of a photon in a medium

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  • #2
However I have not read the articles, I would say the third statement : neither energy nor momentum depend on medium. Medium is made of atoms or ions in vacuum. There photons mostly travel in vacuum and rarely interact with distributed atoms or ions. We may think of moving in vacuum and interaction with atoms separetely.
 
  • #3
I don’t know for single photons, but this particular dilemma is part of classical EM.

For classical EM it is called the Abraham Minkowski controversy. The controversy is basically just that both Abraham and Minkowski have plausible arguments but Minkowski argued that the momentum of an EM wave increases as it enters a transparent medium while Abraham argued that it decreases.

The classical controversy is resolved by considering the momentum of the medium also. The energy and momentum tensor of the EM wave and the material are each individually incomplete. Only the total tensor is well defined.

For details on the resolution of the classical controversy see Peiffer et al https://arxiv.org/abs/0710.0461

I imagine that the essence of the quantum version of this will be resolved similarly, albeit with a bunch more complicated math.
 
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  • #4
weafq said:
According to this paper: ht
Which is nonsense in a predatory journal.
 

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