Does the Charge of Photons Change Our Understanding of Light?

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SUMMARY

The discussion clarifies that photons, the particles of light, are confirmed to have a charge of zero, despite recent claims suggesting otherwise. Experimental evidence indicates that the upper limit for any potential charge of a photon is approximately 10-46 times that of an electron, a significant reduction from the previous upper limit of 10-33. This reinforces the understanding that photons remain uncharged, as any charge would allow for light to be influenced by electric fields. The conversation references the article "Bound on the Photon Charge from the Phase Coherence of Extragalactic Radiation" by Brett Altschul, published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 261801 (2007).

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ArielGenesis
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recently, I read a news that stated that photons, or light particle, has a small amount of charge. what does this suppose to means, and how we know, and how come?
 
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This is a serious misunderstanding. The charge of the photon is still supposed to be 0, but it is not possible to determine it to 0 with 100% accuracy experimentally.

So a recent experiment has shown, that the upper bound for the photon charge is somewhere around 10^{-46} times the charge of an electron. Before the experimental upper bound was somewhere around 10^{-33} times the charge of an electron.
This does not mean, that a photon is charged. We just got closer to 0.

You certainly mean this article:
Bound on the Photon Charge from the Phase Coherence of Extragalactic Radiation by Brett Altschul
Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 261801 (2007)
 
ArielGenesis said:
recently, I read a news that stated that photons, or light particle, has a small amount of charge. what does this suppose to means, and how we know, and how come?

Where did you read that?

Photons do not have charge, otherwise we would be able bend light with an
electric field. Also, charge is quantized. It does not come in arbitrary small
amounts.

The photon has two big brothers which do have a positive and negative
charge equal to that of the electron. These are the intermediate vector
bosons W+ and W- which propagate only over extremely small ranges,
smaller as the radius of an atom's nucleus.

Regards, Hans
 
ArielGenesis said:
recently, I read a news that stated that photons, or light particle, has a small amount of charge. what does this suppose to means, and how we know, and how come?

Again, as has been repeated many times, such a "reference" is not sufficient to conduct any sense of a rational discussion. You must cite a proper reference. It is no longer sufficient here on PF to simply use "I heard" or "I read" when trying to discuss something in this context.

So this is a reminder to everyone else, especially new members on here. If you cannot provide a sufficiently clear source that you can cite, then it can't be that important to you for you not to jot it down, and it can't be discuss with any sense of clarity on here.

Zz.
 

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