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Forums
Physics
Quantum Physics
Do photons that carry orbital angular momentum have mass?
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[QUOTE="PeterDonis, post: 5690239, member: 197831"] Ok, so "helical structures" is just another word for "the spatial part of the photon wave function". But the spatial part is just part of the photon wavefunction, and it's not meaningful to ask whether it, by itself, can contribute to the mass of a system containing many photons. You have to look at the whole wave function. In fact, even looking at the whole wave function might not be meaningful in this context. Protons as composite systems have a significant contribution to their mass from the interaction energy of the strong interaction between the quarks. There is no way to make a composite system out of photons that has that property. The examples of composite systems of photons having nonzero invariant mass are classical: you can have systems containing multiple photons whose total invariant mass is not zero (because invariant mass is not additive; what is additive is 4-momentum, and multiple null 4-momentum vectors can add to a total 4-momentum vector that is not null). [/QUOTE]
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Quantum Physics
Do photons that carry orbital angular momentum have mass?
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