How Does Fock Space Relate to Particle Interactions and States?

[Nano-Passion]

If electron acts both as a wave and a particle; how does an electron emit a photon when it is a wave?

 

[Rlam90]

From what I understand, underneath any observation is behaves as both constantly. It takes on the characteristics of one or the other depending on how the observation is performed.

Don't quote me on this, though. It wasn't until just yesterday that any of the most basic equations clicked in my head.

 

[StevieTNZ]

I'm under the impression an electron is neither a particle or a wave.

 

[A. Neumaier]

If electron acts both as a wave and a particle; how does an electron emit a photon when it is a wave?

A single electron does not emit photons. It only carries with it an electromagnetic field.

Emission processes are scattering events when several particles interact. They behave very much like chemical reactions. For example, absorption and emission of an electron in a hydrogen atom is a reversible reaction of the form
pe + g <==> pe^*,
(p=proton, e= electron, g=gamma=photon), where e^* is an excited state of the electron.

During the reaction, one has complicated intermediate states in a so-called Fock space, not visualizable as a particle or wave. Only the input and output of the scattering process is visualizable in this way.

 

[Delta2]

The wave nature of electron is not to be confused with the wave nature of a photon. Photon itself can be seen as a particle or a wave of the electromagnetic field. Electron as a wave is not a wave of electromagnetic field but a wave of another field.

 

[Rlam90]

A single electron does not emit photons. It only carries with it an electromagnetic field.

Emission processes are scattering events when several particles interact. They behave very much like chemical reactions. For example, absorption and emission of an electron in a hydrogen atom is a reversible reaction of the form
pe + g <==> pe^*,
(p=proton, e= electron, g=gamma=photon), where e^* is an excited state of the electron.

During the reaction, one has complicated intermediate states in a so-called Fock space, not visualizable as a particle or wave. Only the input and output of the scattering process is visualizable in this way.

Is this Fock space a complex geometry within the local space of the interacting particles, or is it a description of the interactions of the particles on an abstract, immeasurably small scale within the local space?

 

[A. Neumaier]

Is this Fock space a complex geometry within the local space of the interacting particles, or is it a description of the interactions of the particles on an abstract, immeasurably small scale within the local space?

Fock space only tells about the possible _states_; nothing about possible _interactions_.

An single proton, electron, or photon is described by a state in the Hilbert space of 3-dimensional wave functions with the appropriate number of components. Fock space is the correctly (anti)symmetrized tensor product of arbitrarily many of these Hilbert spaces, and can describe superpositions of states with 3 particles and states with 2 particles (as needed in the specific example given).

Which reactions are possible is determined not by the Fock space but by the interaction terms in the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian defining the theory.