Degeneracy Factor: Exploring Photon & Polarization

[ajayguhan]

What is degeneracy factor?
What is the degeneracy factor of photon?
What is the difference between degeneracy factor and polarization of light?

 

[Bobbywhy]

Most of what you are asking is described in this paper:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjd/e2003-00323-2#page-1

 

[ajayguhan]

The linkypu have given has some article on the topic, "direct experimental characterization of the bose Einstein distribution of spatial fluctuations of spontaneous of spontaneous parametric downconersion"

I couldn't even understand the topic title!

 

[dauto]

Forget about that paper. The degeneracy factor of a photon is 2 because it may have two polarizations. The degeneracy factor of an electron is also 2 (spin up and spin down).

 

[ajayguhan]

I can get that degeneracy factor of photon is 2
But what is this degeneracy factor? What is intuition behind it? Does it have physical interpretation?

 

[UltrafastPED]

Degeneracy factor is the number of states with the same energy level; think "degrees of freedom" with the same energy.

 

[ajayguhan]

If so then how the degeneracy factor of photon is two?
I Know that light is an electromagnetic wave so there are two fields(electric and magnetic) oscillations perpendicular to each other.

 

[UltrafastPED]

Left handed or right handed polarization - the two spin states. They have the same energy for the same frequency.

Photons are the quantized modes of the Em field.

 

[ajayguhan]

I know that modes are the number of nodes in standing waves.
But what you mean by photos are quantized modes of electromagnetic waves.
Does the photon lies in the nodes of electromagnetic waves?

 

[UltrafastPED]

Modes are not nodes; look up modes of a drum head.
Modes correspond to the eigenvectors.

 

[ajayguhan]

What is modes?

 

[UltrafastPED]

Lookup "normal mode" on Wikipedia.