Historical research guide · 0719 · 1999
The Enigmatic Photon
Myron W. Evans · Jean-Pierre Vigier
In one minute
Between 1994 and 1999 Myron Evans and Jean-Pierre Vigier published five volumes under one title, arguing that light carries more than the two side-to-side components everyone measures. Their proposal is a third magnetic component pointing along the beam — constant rather than oscillating — which they called B(3) and which the later volumes call the Evans–Vigier field. It follows, they argue, from giving electrodynamics a larger symmetry group than the usual one, and the three components are locked together by a cyclic rule they name the B cyclic theorem. Their experimental peg is the inverse Faraday effect, in which circularly polarised light magnetises matter: a measured effect whose driving term is exactly the product of the light’s own vector potential with its conjugate. From there the volumes reach outward — photon mass, Aharonov–Bohm phase, magneto-optical predictions specific enough to test, de Broglie’s pilot wave, electromagnetism in curved spacetime, and an attempt to derive Maxwell’s equations from the cyclic structure itself.
Connection
Chapter 10 is the site’s chapter on the vector potential and on what a light field carries besides its two transverse components, and this five-volume series is the most sustained attempt anyone has made to answer that question in the affirmative. It also links chapter 10 to chapter 2, because the field it proposes is a property of the vacuum itself, and to chapter 5, because Vigier brought de Broglie’s causal programme with him into every volume.
From the source
The proposal, in the series’ own vocabulary. A circularly polarised electromagnetic wave in vacuum is said to carry, besides its two transverse components, a third magnetic component directed along the line of travel and constant rather than oscillating — B(3), later named the Evans–Vigier field. The three are bound by a cyclic relation the authors call the B cyclic theorem, and the whole construction follows from taking the gauge group of electrodynamics to be O(3) rather than the usual U(1). Volume 2 is given over to that step and is subtitled Non-Abelian Electrodynamics.Volume 1, chapters 5 and 12; Volume 2, chapters 3 and 4; Volume 5, chapters 8, 10 and 14
The shape of the work, as published. Five hardback volumes in Kluwer’s Fundamental Theories of Physics series between 1994 and 1999 — numbers 64, 68, 77, 90 and 106 — beginning as a two-author book by Evans and Vigier, widening in volume 3 to include Sisir Roy and Stanley Jeffers, opening in volume 4 to contributed chapters from Erasmo Recami, B. Lehnert, A. E. Chubykalo and R. Smirnov-Rueda, Valeri V. Dvoeglazov and Milán Mészáros, and closing with volume 5 written by Evans alone. Roughly a thousand pages, sixty-three chapters, one hypothesis.Published tables of contents and series numbering of Volumes 1 to 5
The experimental anchor is a real, measured effect. The inverse Faraday effect — circularly polarised light magnetising a material it passes through — is settled physics, and its driving term is the conjugate product of the light’s vector potential with itself, the same quantity the series identifies as the source of B(3). Volume 1 puts a chapter under the heading Experimental Evidence for B(3); Volume 3 opens with the conjugate product in Dirac’s electron theory and devotes a chapter to optical Aharonov–Bohm effects of that product; Volume 5 begins its second part with the ultra-relativistic inverse Faraday effect. The effect is not in dispute. What the series claims is the reading of it.Volume 1, chapter 7; Volume 3, chapters 1 and 3; Volume 5, chapter 4
Photon mass is treated as a live physical question throughout, which is Vigier’s hand in the work. Volume 1 gives a chapter to the concept of photon mass and a chapter to Aharonov–Bohm effects; Volume 3 gives two, on the mass of the photon if particulate and on photon mass in electromagnetic theory; Volume 5 returns to it through a dipole model for the photon. This is the same programme Vigier had pursued with Louis de Broglie since the 1960s, and it is why the series treats a longitudinal component as natural rather than exotic — a massive photon has one.Volume 1, chapters 8 and 9; Volume 3, chapters 6 and 7; Volume 5, chapter 21
The reach of the final volume. Volume 5 works outward from the field to a unified field theory built on B(3), to electromagnetism in curved spacetime, and to a derivation of Maxwell’s equations from the cyclic structure of vacuum electromagnetism — and, in its fifteenth chapter, reads the Evans–Vigier field as a de Broglie pilot field, which places the whole series inside the causal-interpretation programme rather than beside it. Whatever survives of the electrodynamics, that is the ambition the books were written to serve.Volume 5, chapters 9, 15, 22 and 23
What to watch, and it is a clean question with a clean test. Does a constant longitudinal component really accompany a circularly polarised wave? The sharpest published probe of that is superposition — whatever you add to a plane wave has to add the way waves add, because interference measures it directly — and Erhard Wielandt’s two pages of algebra on exactly that point are carried on this site. The series’ own answer is to make magneto-optical predictions specific enough to decide the matter: Volume 5 puts a microwave optical Zeeman effect due to B(3) in chapter 18 and B(3) echoes in chapter 19. A laboratory that measures either result settles this, and neither the objection nor the predictions have been retired.Volume 5, chapters 18 and 19; read against the superposition test at /library/stm-5524013df0
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9044-5How to cite it
Myron W. Evans, Jean-Pierre Vigier (1999) The Enigmatic Photon doi:10.1007/978-94-010-9044-5