The Structure of the Vacuum

and the Photon Number

Iwo Bialynicki-Birula

Center for Theoretical Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences,

Lotnikow 32/46, 02-668 Warsaw, Poland
and Institute of Theoretical Physics, Warsaw University

Abstract. It is shown that the universal expression describing the number of photons
in terms of the electromagnetic field vectors, discovered long time ago by Zeldovich,
makes its appearance in the quantum description of the ground state of the electroma-
gnetic field. It is also argued that this rather unorthodox way of counting the photons
may have consequences for astrophysics and cosmology.

1 Introduction

The standard definition of the vacuum state of the electromagnetic field as the
state with no photons is very simple and extremely useful in most applications
but it does not carry any information about many features of this fundamen-
tal state. In particular, it does not tell us anything about the electromagnetic
structure of the vacuum state. A similar situation occurs in standard wave me-
chanics. We may define the ground state of the harmonic oscillator as the state
that is annihilated by the annihilation operator but this does not tell us what
is the probability distribution of the position or momentum. This additional in-
formation is contained in the wave function and to find the wave function one
must go through the procedure of solving the eigenvalue problem for the energy
operator – the Hamiltonian. For a harmonic oscillator this procedure is routinely
carried out in (almost) every textbook of quantum mechanics but in quantum
electrodynamics this is (almost) never done. Fortunately, the analogy between
the quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator and the electromagnetic field is so
close that one may reproduce the quantum mechanical results by pure analogy,
without going through detailed calculations. This method will be adopted here
and it will lead in a straightforward way to final results. Instead of the wave
function I shall use the Wigner function which carries the same information as
the wave function but in the case of the electromagnetic field exhibits more sym-
metry. In particular, we shall find that the formula for Wigner function of the
ground state in quantum electrodynamics involves the formula for the number
of photons discovered long time ago by Zeldovich [1]. Thus, the structure of the
ground state and the number of photons are intimately related. One may wonder
whether such a relationship also holds for non-Abelian gauge theories.

I. Bialynicki-Birula, The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number, Lect. Notes Phys. 633,
287–295 (2004)
http://www.springerlink.com/
c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004
288 Iwo Bialynicki-Birula

2 Wigner Function in Quantum Mechanics

My aim is to introduce the Wigner function of the electromagnetic field and to
do this I shall proceed by analogy with nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. The
standard definition of the Wigner function for an n-dimensional configuration
space is [2, 3]

dn η
W (p, r) = (2π
) ne
iη·p/

ψ(r − η/2)ψ ∗ (r + η/2). (1)

The ground state of the harmonic oscillator in one dimension is described by the
wave function
 1/4 2
ψ(q) = mω
π
exp(− mωq
2
). (2)

The corresponding Wigner function WG (p, q) is

 
1
WG (p, q) = π
exp − 2E(p,q)

ω , (3)

where E(p, q) is the classical expression for the energy of the oscillator
p2 mω 2 q 2
E(p, q) = 2m + 2 . (4)

The expression in the exponent may be viewed as twice the number of excita-
tions: the total energy E(p, q) divided by the energy of one excitation
ω. This
result is most easily extended to many dimensions by employing complex not-
ation. Let me define classical analogs of annihilation and creation operators A
and A∗ ,

p
A = √2m +i m 2 ωq, (5)

to rewrite the energy in the form

E(p, q) = A∗ A. (6)

In n dimensions the complex variables A and A∗ become n-dimensional vectors

A and A∗ and the energy is

E(pi , q i ) = A∗ ·A. (7)

In general the frequencies do not form a diagonal matrix so that the components
Ai ,

Ai = √p2m
i
+i m j
2 ωij q , (8)

are not to be identified with normal modes. Taking this into account, one may
extend the formula (3) to n dimensions as follows
 ∗ 1

WG (pi , q i ) = (π
) n exp −2A
ω̂ A .
1
(9)
 The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number 289

Therefore, one has to calculate the inverse of the frequency matrix to find the
Wigner function of the ground state.
The Wigner function for mixed states is defined as a weighted sum of the
pure state components. In particular, the Wigner function for the thermal state
of the harmonic oscillator in one dimension is (see, for example, [3])
 
WT (p, q) = tanh(
ω/2kT
π

)
exp −2 tanh(
ω/2kT

ω
) E(p,q)
. (10)

Generalization from one dimension to many dimensions consists in replacing q

and p by n dimensional vectors and ω by the matrix ω̂.

3 Wigner Functional for the Electromagnetic Field

Since the electromagnetic field may be viewed as one huge, infinitely dimensional
harmonic oscillator, it is possible to write down the expressions for the Wigner
function (or rather Wigner functional) of the electromagnetic field by an extra-
polation from n to infinitely many dimensions. The starting point is the standard
expression for the energy of the electromagnetic field
 
E = d3 r D(r,t)·D(r,t)
20 + B(r,t)·B(r,t)
2µ0 . (11)

With the use of the complex Riemann-Silberstein vector [4]

F = √D + i √B , (12)
20 2µ0

the field energy can be cast into the form analogous to (7)

E = d3 r F ∗ (r, t)·F (r, t). (13)

In order to write down the Wigner functional WG of the ground state, one has
to evaluate the inverse of the frequency matrix in the coordinate representation.
This can easily be done using the Fourier transformation

1
 d3 k eik·(r−r
)

ω̂ (r, r ) =
1
(2π)3
c|k| = 2π2
c|r−r
|2 , (14)

and at the end one arrives at the formula

WG [D, B] = exp(−2N [D, B]), (15)

where
 
∗
(r
,t)
N [D, B] = 2π12
c d3 r d3 r F (r,t)·F
|r−r
|2
   
µ0 D(r,t)·D(r
,t)

0 B(r,t)·B(r ,t)
= 4π2
d r d3 r
1 3
0 |r−r |
2 + µ0 |r−r
|2 . (16)
290 Iwo Bialynicki-Birula

I have explicitly indicated the arguments of the Wigner functional. The magne-
tic induction B (strictly speaking the vector potential A) is the counterpart
of the position q and the electric displacement vector D is the counterpart of
the momentum p. There is only one element missing in (15): the overall nor-
malization. One cannot extend the normalization used in the finite-dimensional
case to the infinite number of dimensions because it would produce an infinite
prefactor. Therefore, the Wigner functional of the full electromagnetic field can
only be used to determine relative probabilities of different field configurations
in a given state. The same expression (15) has been obtained before [5], starting
from the field functional of the ground state of the electromagnetic field.
The Wigner functional of the thermal state of the electromagnetic field can
be found by the same method as in the case of the ground state by integrating
the single oscillator formula (10) over all wave vectors. The integration over k,
after integration by parts (the oscillating boundary value at ∞ should be killed
by an appropriate regularization), reduces to the following integral
  ∞
d3 k ik·r tanh(
ωk /2kT ) dk k2 sin(kr) tanh(
ck/2kT )
(2π) 3 e
ωk = 2π 2 kr
ck
0
 ∞
1
= 4π2
kT r2 dk cosh2cos(kr)
(
ck/2kT )
(17)
0

that can be found in Gradshteyn and Ryzhik [6]

 ∞
cos(ax) aπ
dx cosh2 (bx) = 2b2 sinh(aπ/2b) . (18)
0

Finally, one obtains


d3 k ik·r tanh(
ωk /2kT ) kT
(2π)3 e
ωk = 2π
2 c2 |r| sinh(πkT |r|/
c) . (19)

The Wigner functional (up to the normalization factor) for the thermal state of
the full electromagnetic field is

WT [D, B] = exp (−2Θ [D, B]) , (20)

where the exponent Θ [B, D] is (the factor of 2 has been misplaced in [5])
 
Θ [D, B] = 4π

kT
2 c2 d 3
r d3 r 
√ √ 
µ0 /0 D(r,t)·D(r
,t)+ 0 /µ0 B(r,t)·B(r
,t)
× |r−r
| sinh(πkT |r−r
|/
c) . (21)

In the limit, when T → 0, this expression tends to the ground state form (15)
while for T → ∞ it goes to zero. Both these limits are in full agreement with our
expectations. At zero temperature, excited states do not contribute and at very
high temperatures all configurations become equally probable: the distribution
is becoming flat, every configuration carries zero weight. The Wigner functional
 The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number 291

of a Gaussian form, such as the one for the ground state or the thermal state,
is positive definite. Therefore, it has a direct probabilistic interpretation. These
Wigner functionals determine the statistical distribution of electric and magnetic
fields. In the ground state, the probability to find a particular configuration
of the electromagnetic field depends only on the number of photons in this
configuration. There is a significant difference between the ground state and the
thermal state. In the ground state the correlations between the field values at
different points are long range but in the thermal state they are short range. The
range is determined by the thermal length λT =
c/kT . At the temperature
of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) this length is λT = 8.4 ·
10−4 m while at the room temperature λT = 7.6 · 10−6 m. Thermal fluctuations
wipe out correlations. At macroscopic distances the fields become statistically
independent.

4 The Number of Photons

The dimensionless number N [B, D] appearing in the Wigner functional of the
electromagnetic field for the ground state must possess some special physical
significance. This number has the full symmetry of free Maxwell theory. It is
a perfect scalar, invariant under Poincaré transformations and under conformal
transformations [7]. As has been observed long time ago by Zeldovich [1], this
quantity after field quantization becomes the photon number operator. In order
to see this one may use the decomposition of the field operator F̂ into plane
waves
  
F̂ =
ωk
0 V e(k) e
ik·r−iωk t
âk + e−ik·r+iωk t b̂†k , (22)
k

where âk and b̂k are the annihilation operators of photons with opposite circular
polarization. The substitution of this decomposition into the quantum counter-
part of the formula (16) leads (after all the integrations and normal ordering) to
the well known expression for the photon number operator
  ∗  † 
F̂ (r
,t)
N̂ = 2π2
d r d3 r F̂ (r,t)·
1 3
|r−r |
2 = âk âk + b̂ †
k b̂ k . (23)
k

Thus, the expression (16) is the classical limit of the photon number operator. In
this limit the creation and annihilation operators should be replaced by complex
amplitudes,
 
âk , b̂†k → (αk , βk∗ ) , (24)

and the number of photons operator becomes a pure, dimensionless number.

The total number of photons may be written as the space integral of the
following “photon density” ρ(r, t)

∗
ρ(r, t) = 2π2
c d3 η F (r+η/2)·F
1
|η|2
(r−η/2)
. (25)
292 Iwo Bialynicki-Birula

Together with the “photon current” j(r, t),


∗
j(r, t) = 2iπ12
d3 η F (r+η/2)×F
|η|2
(r−η/2)
, (26)

ρ(r, t) satisfies the continuity equation ∂t ρ + ∇ · j = 0 but it cannot be treated

as a genuine photon density since it is not positive everywhere. This was to be
expected because photons are not strictly localizable.

5 Number of Photons for Various Field Configurations

It is worth stressing that the formula (16) is universal. One may use it even when
the decomposition of the field into modes is unknown. Given any configuration
of the classical electromagnetic field at a time t, one can calculate this number. It
may even be applied to static fields, for which, according to traditional wisdom,
the notion of the number of photons seems meaningless. I shall give several
estimates of the number of photons in such unusual situations1 .
First, let us consider the number of photons in the Coulomb field of an
elementary charge,
 


e2
NC = 4π210
c (4π) 2 d3 r d3 r r3 r
3r·r
|r−r
|2 . (27)

This expression is ultraviolet and infrared divergent but both these infinities
are removed by physical cutoffs. The ultraviolet cutoff l for electrons should be
placed around the electron Compton wave length, l = 10−13 m because of the
QED vacuum polarization and for protons around the proton radius l = 10−15 m.
The infrared cutoff R, or the screening length, is due to the polarization of the
surrounding medium; all charges in reality are eventually screened. With these
provisions the number of photons in the Coulomb field is
 R  R  1
NC = 2πα
dr dr du r2 +r
2u−2rr
u
l l −1
 2
  
1+l/R
α
= 2π 2 ln( Rl ) + 2 ln(1 − Rl 2 ) + ( Rl + Rl ) ln 1−l/R − 4 ln 2
 R
π ln( l ) + 1 − 2 ln 2 ,
≈ α (28)

where α is the fine structure constant. This number is tiny; it amounts only to
0.08 Coulomb photons per one isolated proton in the intergalactic space where
the screening radius is about 1 m and only 0.024 photons in the Coulomb field
of the hydrogen atom where the screening radius is given by the Bohr radius.
The situation is quite different for static magnetic fields because they are not
screened and may extend over vast regions. In the simplest case, for a constant
1
Note that while formula (16) can be applied to time independent fields, the de-
composition (22) into propagating photon modes and the ensuing number operator
(23) strictly should exclude the static contribution. Thus, result (16) appears more
generally applicable than its interpretation related to (23) [note added by editor].
 The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number 293

field occupying a sphere of radius R, the number of photons is given by the

formula
   
d3 r |r−r
2 2 4
N = 4π2Bµ0
c d3 r 1

|2 = Bµ0R

c I, (29)
r<R r<R

where the remaining dimensionless triple integral happens to be equal to 1,

 1  1  1
I=2 dξξ 2 dηη 2 du ξ2 +η21−2ξηu = 1. (30)
0 0 −1

A constant field is not a realistic magnetic field configuration since magnetic field
lines must close. However, for every field configuration that occupies a region of
volume V the number of photons will be given by the formula

N = 2.5 · 1031 B 2 V 4/3 κ, (31)

where κ is a numerical coefficient depending on the field configuration and the

shape of the region and B and V are measured in teslas and cubic meters,
respectively. For all static field configurations varying in space on the scale of R,
there will be no dramatic cancellations and κ will be of the order of 1. Therefore,
the number of photons in a static magnetic field scales with the four-thirds power
of the volume V and may become huge for large objects. The galactic magnetic
field is rather weak [8], about 5 · 10−10 T, but the large volume of the Milky
Way makes the difference. Taking the diameter as 60 000 ly and the thickness
as 1000 ly one obtains for the volume about 1012 ly3 cube and that amounts
to V = 1060 m3 . Upon inserting these numbers into (31) one obtains for the
Milky Way about 1092 magnetic photons. This result is to be compared with the
number of CMB photons. At T = 2.728 K there are 4.12·108 photons in one cubic
meter. This gives only about 1068 CMB photons in the Milky Way. The ratio
of these two numbers is 1024 ! One may also estimate the number of Coulomb
photons in the Milky Way. Assuming (very roughly!) that the whole mass of the
Milky Way, equal to about 1012 solar masses, is composed of hydrogen atoms,
with our estimate of 0.024 Coulomb photons for one hydrogen atom, we obtain
again 1068 , the same number as for the CMB photons.
Are all these estimates of any value? The ratio of the number of photons to
the number of baryons in the Universe plays an important role in cosmology.
I have shown that the traditional counting of photons may have to be modified
when the evaluation of the photon number takes into account also static fields.
Of course, the number of photons inside the galaxies is very small as compared to
the number of photons outside the galaxies. However, there is some evidence [8]
that intergalactic magnetic fields exist and are only a few orders of magnitude
weaker than the galactic ones. Should this be true and indeed there is some
large scale magnetic field in the intergalactic space, even a much weaker one
than the galactic field, our counting of the photons in the Universe would be
quite different.
294 Iwo Bialynicki-Birula

6 Photons Trapped by Gravitational Field

Very large number of photons stored in the galactic magnetic field raises the
question, how they were captured in this state at the first place. Of course, one
may pursue the standard line of reasoning and try to explain the magnetic field
by some kind of dynamo mechanism [8], but I am tempted to speculate that
the galactic magnetic field may be due to the BEC mechanism. To make this
idea more plausible, one would have to show that there might exist a photon
mode in the galaxy that would produce the galactic magnetic field when filled
with a huge number of photons. This mode cannot be strictly stationary because
(excluding black holes) gravity cannot bind massless particles. However, it would
be sufficient to show that there is a very long lived state playing the role of
the ground state of radiation. In order to see whether this is possible, let me
analyze the Maxwell equations in curved space from that point of view. Maxwell
equations in curved space expressed in terms of complex field vectors F and G
have the form [4]

i∂t F (r, t) = c∇ × G(r, t) , (32)

∇·F (r, t) = 0 , (33)

where

G= √E + i √H . (34)
2µ0 2
0

The metric tensor is hidden in the “gravitational constitutive relations” that

connect the vectors F and G,
 ij 
F i = − g100 √g−g + i g0k εikj Gj . (35)

The Maxwell equations for the photon wave function in a rotationally symmetric
gravitational field described by the metric tensor

{gµ0 ν } = Diag{g(r), −h(r), −h(r), −h(r)}, (36)

expressed in terms of the G vector, read

i∂t f (r)G(r, t) = c∇ × G(r, t), (37)

where

f (r) = h(r)/g(r). (38)

Stationary solutions of Maxwell equations after the separation of the time va-
riable obey the eigenvalue equation

∇ × G(r) = κf (r)G(r), (39)

where κ = ω/c is the length of the wave vector. Owing to the spherical symmetry,
the solution can be sought as a sum of angular momentum eigenstates. For each
 The Structure of the Vacuum and the Photon Number 295

pair of eigenvalues J and M of the total angular momentum and its projection
on the z axis, the solution is a sum of three terms
A(r) (e) B(r) (m) C(r) (l)
G= r Y JM + r Y JM + r Y JM . (40)
Upon substituting this sum into (39) one obtains a set of three coupled equations
for A, B and C. The elimination of the functions A(r) and C(r) leads to the
following equation for the function B(r),
d2 B J(J+1)
dr 2 − 1 df dB
f dr dr − r2 B + κ2 f 2 B = 0. (41)

After the substitution B(r) = f (r)ψ(r), this equation takes on the form of the
time-independent Schrödinger equation for the radial wave function ψ(r)
2
− d dr
ψ(r)
2 + J(J+1)
r2 ψ(r) + U (r)ψ(r) = κ2 ψ(r), (42)
where the potential function U (r) is
 2 2
df
U (r) = 4f3 2 dr − 1 d f
2f dρ2 − κ2 (f 2 − 1). (43)

For all asymptotically flat metrics, U (r) vanishes at infinity. Therefore, bound
states with positive energy (κ2 > 0) are ruled out. However, this argument does
not exclude a quasi-bound state. A quasi-bound state might be formed when
the potential U (r) has a potential well for smaller r which is separated from
large values of r by a potential barrier. If a long-lived quasi-bound state would
exist photons might condense into such a state. Large number of photons in the
Bose-Einstein condensate may produce the magnetic field observed in the Milky
Way.

Acknowledgments
I would like to that Zofia Bialynicka-Birula for many constructive comments and
advice. This work was supported by the KBN Grant 5PO3B 14920.

References
1. Ya.B. Zeldovich: Dokl. Acad. Sci. USSR, 163, 1359 (1965), (in Russian)
2. E.P. Wigner: Phys. Rev. 40, 749 (1932)
3. M. Hillery, R.F. O’Connell, M.O. Scully, and E.P. Wigner: Phys. Rep. 106, 121
(1984)
4. I. Bialynicki-Birula: ‘Photon wave function’. In: Progress in Optics, Vol. XXXVI,
ed. by E. Wolf (Elsevier, Amsterdam 1996), p. 245
5. I. Bialynicki-Birula: Opt. Commun. 179, 237 (2000)
6. I.S. Gradshteyn and Ryzhik: Tables of Integrals, Sums and Products (Academic,
New York 1980)
7. L. Gross: J. Math. Phys. 5, 687 (1964)
8. L.M. Widrow: Rev. Mod. Phys. 74, 775 (2002)